EMC is betting that data velocity demands more than spinning disk. We know that much.

The real question comes down to how fast the storage company can pivot to beat fast growing providers like Fusion-io and Violin Memory. It’s this unanswered question that makes EMCWorld one of the  more closely watched events of the spring  conference season.

Will EMC offer a pure-flash array? It appears so with the acquisition of Xtremio. But the heart of the EMC strategy still focuses on the concept of “data decay,” which predicates that hard disk drives play a central role in most any storage offering.

The news from EMC  today demonstrates its position. EMC reduces the price of flash in its VNX family of mid-range storage offerings. That’s bread and butter stuff.  But it is exemplary  of what we can expect for at least the next year from EMC.

IDC makes the point that data has the shelf-life of a banana. Thanks to analytic tools, data gets processed quickly. Flash is still quite expensive. To allay that cost, IDC says the “SSD tier is replenished constantly with only the highest activity data. As data activity falls for  a given data set, it is evicted from the highest $/GB tier and moved down. The capacity on the SSD tier is thus freed up for newer and “hotter” data hierarchy. As data moves down, the capacity on the SSD tier is thus freed up.”

But to maintain its mojo, EMC needs a deeper flash play and that’s why Xtremio is so important. We’ll see its place this week as Pat Gelsinger outlines what he alluded to a few months ago at the Project Lightning event where it unveiled VFCache. Namely, hard drive days are numbered.

As Wikibon’s David Floyer writes:

Clearly EMC understands the urgency of competing effectively in the marketplace, and protecting its legacy tier 1 storage array base. EMC needed to make this move, and has correctly made it early. It is likely that other technologies will be needed to flesh out this investment, particularly in the area of object files system and components to support high-performance database.

This acquisition will prompt a similar round of purchases from IBM, HP, NetApp, and possibly CISCO, as the flash-only vendors start to bite into the profitable revenues of the legacy tier 1 high-end storage arrays. There will be a chance for more debutantes to dance.