Josh Goldstein, vice president of Product Marketing and Management at XtremIO, spoke to theCUBE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante at the recent EMC World 2014 conference in Las Vegas. Goldstein spoke about XtremIO’s $1 Million Challenge, where the company guarantees its product will stay inline all the time. This means its flash arrays won’t switch off, throttle back, or revert to a system-level garbage collection state.

Inline refers to how the array handles data, specifically the reduction of duplicated information. This allows for a smaller data footprint on the array and an increase in the amount of information that users can store on the array. Best of all, this helps speed the drive up by increasing the flash array’s write bandwidth.

When asked about the importance of inline performance, Goldstein elaborated that inline performance is a necessity when building flash arrays. Only by having a consistent and predictable system can a company meet customer expectations. Whereas flash of the past has had unpredictable and sometimes weird effects, XtremIO has strived to develop a flash array that is low latency with a higher level of performance over other platforms. This has led XtremIO, and subsequently EMC, to rocket to the top of the all-flash array market.

The stack at XtremIO was purpose built by the XtremIO team. This includes the concepts for how the array is architected. All of that was built from day one in a unique fashion, allowing XtremIO to envision new developments from the beginning. The whole stack was designed this way, and it was architected so that even though an idea might not currently be a reality, the stack takes this into account and allows XtremIO to roll them out at a later date, after development.

“Everything was built around the idea of having a random access media and knowing we were going to have that from day one,” Goldstein said.

In assessing the future direction of XtremIO, Goldstein said that the company is pedal to the metal. And it’s not just him saying it. He elaborated, “We have a lot of customers now, and they have things they want to see in the products. We have a very large sales force that is out there representing this product, and they have things they want to see for their customers. So, our challenge is getting that in there as fast as we can.”