EMC Flash Products
News went crazy yesterday with leaks of EMC mulling to purchase XtremeIO. While flash is the wave of the future for storage it will by no means be a revenue driver for companies like EMC or NetApp in in the short term. We had a great question and answer from EMC’s Q1 2012 conference calls that discusses more about flash breakdown in its products.
Aaron Rakers - Stifel Nicolaus – Analyst
Yes, thanks, and congratulations on a great quarter. Kind of sticking to the similar topic, on the drive discussion, you obviously outlined that the price differential between flash, and all the way down to near line SATA drives. Can you talk a little bit about the mix of those drive configurations, where we stand today, and where you expect to be a year from now? And also on top of that, how we should think about that, similar to the price discussion, the differential in the gross margin that EMC sees? Thank you.
David Goulden - EMC Corp – EVP and CFO
All right. In terms of — yes, right, you are right. Right now, when you look at what sit, what we ship in size arrays, the majority, the vast major part is between fiber and the SATA FAST type drives. Flash today, is a small single-digit percentage, but the outage goes in hybrid array, a little flash goes a long way. And what I mean by that is that, you could improve the performance of an array dramatically, by having maybe less than 5% of the capacity in flash, and using FAST software, moving those hot data sets into the high performing media types. So we see a small increase, and a steady increase going forward in the mix of flash. But we still think that the vast majority of capacity shipped for many, many years, is going to be fiber and SATA. Within there, a mix more towards SATA, and less towards fiber, but we think that’s pretty much how things play out. And then from a margin point of view, as Joe said, we’re fairly agnostic to the media type. In fact, different media types are in fact good for us, because we can offer more choices and more price points to our customers. And we are getting very broadly similar margins across those media types. So the mix shift in media is not going to have a material impact on our gross margins.
