EMC has announced delivery of its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) technology across its Symmetrix, Clariion and Celerra line of storage arrays. The technology will allow data volumes to be dynamically moved between tiers of storage, depending on business performance requirements.
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, as well as EMC Celerra NS unified storage systems. FAST will identify data sets at the volume level only and, on average, will allow sets down to a gigabyte to be automatically moved between storage tiers initially.
EMC also laid out its strategic direction for other advances in automated tiering technology, which will eventually allow its software to identify data sets smaller than a megabyte in size and move them to the most appropriate level of data storage -- be it solid state drives (SSD), Fibre Channel, or SATA.
While it can be completely automated, FAST also allows storage administrators to work in a "user approval mode," where an admin is notified through a wizard before data is actually migrated to other drives. That way, users can get accustomed to using the FAST technology before implementing it in full auto mode.
EMC said its FAST roadmap involves combining capabilities such as 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.