EMC's FAST route to storage efficiency

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 08 December 2009 10:33

New software for EMC storage devices automatically allocates data to high-performance or slower but cheaper drives as appropriate for its usage.

The ideas behind information lifecycle management - moving data to cheaper but slower devices as demand for it falls - aren't new. But EMC claims its FAST (fully automated storage tiering) technology is an industry first when it comes to eliminating manual storage administration for this purpose.

Furthermore, the company claims the combination of FAST, enterprise-grade flash drives and SATA drives can improve service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs by at least 20% and storage operational expenses by 40%.

Acquisition costs are reduced by minimising the number of high-performance drives required. Automatically moving newly-inactive data to slower drives frees space for fresh data.

But there's no point reducing the amount spent on hardware if all the savings go on increased staff costs to manage the process of correctly locating the data.

Once tiering policies have been established by storage administrators, FAST software monitors, analyses, and responds to changes in the value and access patterns of the data to self-optimise storage resources, EMC officials claimed.

The software also makes it possible for users to set tiering rules with or without administrator approval for every change.

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