The latest product of EMC Corp.’s intensifying efforts to diversify beyond the traditional disk arrays that presently account for the bulk of its revenues is a new block storage module that promises to make software-defined operating models more accessible for customers. It’s an implementation of the buzzed-about Server SAN architecture first outlined by Wikibon last year.

The ScaleIO Node is a standard white-label machine that EMC resells under its own brand with direct-attached storage that can be clustered across multiple units into a unified pool of capacity decoupled from the underlying hardware. That enables administrators to provision volumes faster and make configuration changes faster than they could in traditional environments.

It’s the same pitch that EMC has been making for the standalone edition of its ScaleIO platform but in a more consumable form that offers customers a simpler alternative to buying the hardware separately and then setting everything up their own. Doing away with all that hassle, the company hopes, will help bolster the value proposition.

It’s making the appeal as wide as possible by offering the ScaleIO Node in two flavors each geared toward a different use case. The first targets storage-intensive workloads such as archives that require large amounts of cost-effective capacity with a bare minimum of processing power to go along.

In that kind of setup, the archiving application or whatever it is that a customer chooses to deploy in their implementation is not deployed on the ScaleIO Node themselves but rather separate application servers specifically designed for that purpose. It’s the exact opposite of how the second configuration of the ScaleIO Node is meant to be used, which is specifically optimized for performance-intensive workloads.

The 2U model includes four sub-nodes each with its own dual-processor motherboard that together provide more than enough to run applications directly on top. That horsepower is matched on the storage side, where customers can choose to use nothing but speedy flash drives for up to 100 million IOPS in a deployment of 500 ScaleIO Nodes.

The system is able to scale much further than that if necessary, all while maintaining what EMC claims is eight times better performance than traditional SANs. It’s also a lot more efficient since place storage drives in the server instead of a separate closet reduces space, power and cooling requirements.  The ScaleIO Node is slated to hit general availability in the first quarter of next year.

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