EMC unveils FAST technology
ConvergenceAsia staff
09/12/2009

Information infrastructure solutions company EMC has outlined its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) vision and announced the new EMC FAST technology, which will serve as the foundation for integrating all of its leading storage efficiency and automation capabilities, allowing IT organisations to manage more information more efficiently in a smaller footprint, use less power and cooling, and lower storage capital and operational costs.

Pat Gelsinger, EMC President and Chief Operating Officer, Information Infrastructure Products, said over the past two years, EMC has optimised all of its major storage architectures to support new levels of automation required in virtual data centre environments and for the transition to private clouds. “These dynamic and agile environments require the capabilities that EMC’s FAST technology provides for effective management and scaling.”

EMC’s FAST technology combines the performance benefits of enterprise flash drives, which can increase application performance by as much as 800 per cent for active data, with the cost benefits of high capacity SATA disk drives, which can lower cost-per-megabyte by as much as 80 per cent for inactive data.

Brian Gallagher, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group, said, “EMC’s FAST technology is all about optimising based on how applications need to access data. Sometimes that means optimising for increased performance to process more transactions, and other times that means automatically optimising to enable lower costs. It is designed to make the underlying technologies and infrastructure more efficient, more dynamic, and ultimately invisible to the end user.”

EMC’s vision for FAST is to combine capabilities including sub-LUN tiering, capacity allocation on demand, block and file level deduplication, data compression, disk drive spin down, built-in archiving, and private and public cloud federation to provide unprecedented levels of automation, management, and cost efficiencies.

Managing the explosive growth in file, unstructured and object-based data is a major challenge. Doing it without meaningful automation and policy management is nearly impossible, said Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMC’s Unified Storage Group.

“EMC’s FAST technology allows customers to move and tier this data within a system, across system types, or into the cloud. This not only provides a range of new archive approaches, it also dramatically simplifies the management of unstructured data at scale,” he said.

The first phase of EMC FAST technology is available immediately for new and existing EMC Symmetrix V-Max and EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage systems, and EMC Celerra NS unified storage systems.

Additional phases of EMC’s FAST technology will roll out beginning in 2010.

advertisement