In his latest Wikibon Peer Incite, “EMC Invited XtremIO to the Flash-only Ball”, co-founder and CTO David Floyer analyzes EMC’s purchase of flash-storage startup XtremIO, and discusses why EMC picked this particular vendor and, more important, why it bought a flash-only storage company at all.

Basically, he says, EMC clearly sees the writing on the wall – by 2015 disk-based tier 1 will be legacy technology, replaced by flash. Rather than making the too common large-vendor mistake of defending its old technology and markets to the death, EMC has chosen to move aggressively into the new world of hybrid flash/disk tiered systems.

That is what EMC leadership promised in its Thunder and Lightning announcement earlier this year. To achieve the next step in that process, EMC needed new technology, and rather than develop it in house, it chose to buy that technology, and a strong flash storage development team. This early, aggressive move is the right strategy, Floyer says, keeping it ahead of its competition. The other large storage vendors will probably make similar purchases to catch up.

So what does this portend for the future? In his conclusion Floyer defines what the three tiers of the 2015 storage architecture will look like, with a flash-only tier 1, a hybrid flash/disk tier two, and a tier three using disk and tape with metadata on an active data layer.

While not a major change in Wikibon’s previous analysis of the disruptive impact of NAND flash on the storage market as a whole, this piece elaborates further on that vision, puts this latest announcement into that vision, and confirms EMC as the leader in this transition, at least for now.