Networking Blog

EMC has demonstrated the concept of fully automated management of tiered storage, FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering), and announced the availability of technology opening new possibilities in the field of storage management. EMC provides a high level of automation of all its core storage platforms allowing organizations with limited resources to competently manage volumes of information, the annual percentage growth in double-digit. New technology EMC FAST is available now and allows you to automate the transfer of information in data storage and save an enormous amount of time that is spent in the performance of routine operations on the storage management manually and calculated for hours or even days. As a result of the middle class equipped with the technology EMC FAST, Corporate Disk Flash (EFD) and SATA drives will surpass its predecessors in performance, while allowing to save up to 20% on the cost of storage devices and up to 40% in operating costs related to storage data.

Technology EMC FAST will provide the basis for the integration of all the advanced automation capabilities and improve the efficiency of data storage. It enables organizations to improve information management and treat fewer resources and reduce energy consumption, save on air conditioning due to the lower heat output and reduce capital and operating costs of storage.

Technology EMC FAST ensures that the right information at the right time will be in the right place and will be stored more efficiently and economically. It allows for full capacity use as high-performance enterprise storage Flash, increasing system performance by 800% and working with active data, and economical high-capacity SATA drives, from which savings could be made up to 80% for storage of inactive data (per megabyte ).

Due to the ever-increasing volumes of data and new requirements for gaining popularity of virtual data centers and private clouds organizations are in need of new tools automate and simplify their infrastructures,allowing to implement the concept of information technology in the form of services. The emergence of technology EMC FAST marks a turning point in the field of data storage and radically alter the very principles of construction and operation of corporate information infrastructures. EMC Corporation is planning to include in the FAST technology to a wide range of functions, including tiered storage within a single logical device, the distribution of capacity on demand, data deduplication at the block level and file compression, disable drive, built-in backup tools and combining data in private and the clouds to meet the common unprecedented level of automation, ease of management and economy.

The first implementation of EMC FAST technology is already available for deployment in network storage systems EMC Symmetrix V-Max and EMC CLARiiON CX4, as well as Unified Storage EMC Celerra NS. The main components of this implementation:

1. Convenient means to create and enforce policy tiered storage that can simplify and automate the deployment and movement of data in the storage system, based on the needs of the organization.
2. Multi-function built-in software to monitor and analyze usage data and various automatic reaction to its change. This software allows you to automatically optimize the distribution of storage capacity and allows applications to simultaneously take advantage of a high-performance enterprise drives Flash, and cost-effective, compact and low power consumption of high-capacity SATA drives.
3. Flexible and robust policies allow you to create rules for the distribution of data on levels of storage needs. These rules may be applied either automatically or with administrator approval.
4. Innovative features file system for the integration with partial clouds and external cloud infrastructure, and to automate integration and file transfer as well as unstructured data.
5. A variety of management functions that allow applications to fully automate the search and reporting on the distribution of data on levels of storage. With these functions it is possible to view the structure and attributes of storage resources, obtain information on the distribution of containers and space, as well as to analyze current and historical performance for the implementation of the operational models of pay-per use and the possibility of a return of funds paid.

Upcoming releases of EMC FAST technology will begin in early 2010.