Jeff Janukowicz, a research director at IDC, said the annual flash capacity shipped in the enterprise will grow by 20 times by 2016 because of the ever-growing number of applications, the digitization of data, and the growing use of the cloud and Big Data.

"Storage I/O is a critical performance bottleneck for many data-intensive applications," Janukowicz said. "Flash is the essential ingredient in the industry's race for application speed. With these latest updates to EMC VFCache, EMC is delivering efficiency that didn't previously exist for the customer. This addition to its comprehensive Flash portfolio is an important evolution."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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