HOPKINTON, USA: EMC Corporation outlined its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) technology, which adds automatic tiering capability to its storage systems, enabling them to dynamically move data around so that the most accessed information is on the fastest media such as Flash drives.

EMC is delivering unprecedented automation capabilities across all primary EMC storage platforms to help resource-constrained IT organizations manage strong double-digit annual information growth.

HP builds multi-tiered design for data centre

The new EMC FAST technology, available immediately, automates the movement of data within a storage system, replacing hours or even days of repetitive, manual storage administrative tasks. As a result, an average system configuration with a combination of EMC FAST technology, enterprise flash drives and SATA disk drives, can deliver higher service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs by at least 20 percent and lowering storage operational expenses by 40 percent.

EMC's FAST technology will serve as the foundation for integrating all of its leading storage efficiency and automation capabilities, allowing IT organizations to manage more information more efficiently in a smaller footprint, use less power and cooling, and lower storage capital and operational costs.

Managing data is the key for cost-effective operations

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

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.

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. Key capabilities include:

The ability to easily create and apply tiering policies to transparently automate the control, placement, and movement of data within the storage system based on business needs.

Sophisticated built-in software to monitor, analyze, and respond to changes in the value and access patterns of the data to self-optimize storage resources, allowing applications to leverage the ultra-high performance of enterprise flash drives as well as maximize the cost, energy, and footprint efficiencies of high-capacity SATA drives.

Flexible and robust policies that enable users to define tiering rules to support service-level requirements automatically or with administrator approval.

Innovative file system capabilities that permit integration with internal private clouds and external cloud service providers to seamlessly federate placement and movement of file-based and unstructured data.

Advanced management capabilities that automate the end-to-end discovery and reporting of applications to storage tiers to easily view storage resource topologies and attributes, capacity allocation and free space, and real time and historical performance metrics to enable "pay for use" and "charge back" operational models.

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