EMC used much of its keynote time at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Tuesday to talk about its upcoming all-flash storage array that will be the result of its recent acquisition of the Israeli flash-memory startup XtremIO.

EMC is trying to have as wide a range of storage solutions that use flash as it can, and the XtremIO-based array will be one of them. The effort is called Project X.

Jeremy Burton, executive VP and chief marketing officer at EMC, said this would be a solution specifically for customers who have a large volume of data that needs to be accessed constantly, random IO patterns and consistently high performance.

Desktop virtualization is a good example of an application that has “a requirement for incredibly high performance but very very random IO patterns,” Burton said.

Burton did not say when EMC expected to put the product on the market, but previewed a general outline of what it is going to be like. Besides it being an all-flash array, a major feature is its deduplication capability.

“Dedupe is inherently built into the system,” Burton said. Deduplication solves two fundamental problems with flash, he explained: it is still expensive and it burns out.

“Flash, relatively speaking, is still a much more expensive medium,” he said, and deduplication reduces the amount of storage capacity necessary. It also reduces the amount of writes necessary, slowing down the process of “burning out”, caused by writes.

The solution will also have many automated features built in to shorten deployment time.

The box’s hardware components will be commodity components available on the market. “The magic is software” that will run on top of those components, Burton said.

This magic is promising to deliver better performance, smaller floor-space and power requirements and lower cost.

EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci, speaking before Burton, said there was need for all types of storage media: in-memory, flash and disk. There is no right answer to the question ‘which medium is the best?’

“The answer is all of those places are the right places to store data,” Tucci said. “I don’t think there will be such a thing as all-disk arrays in the future.”

The key today is software intelligence that automates the process of determining which medium will be the optimal choice (in terms of all three: performance, accessibility and cost) for each chunk of data stored.

“You want to dynamically do that in an automated fashion,” Tucci said.

EMC bought XtremIO, a “pre-revenue” company, in May. The company did not disclose the price tag, but Israeli publication called Globes put it at US$430m.

Before the acquisition, XtremIO had only raised $25m through its two financing rounds.

EMC is an Oracle partner of 17 years. The two companies currently have more than 70,000 joint customers.