EMC has unveiled its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) vision and announced delivery of its first technology to deliver new automation capabilities across all primary EMC storage platforms.

The new EMC FAST technology automates the movement of data within a storage system. It 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 NSunified 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.

“EMC’s FAST technology is all about optimizing based on how applications need to access data. Sometimes that means optimizing for increased performance to process more transactions, and other times that means automatically optimizing to enable lower costs. The intelligence we’ve built into our FAST technology is based on hundreds of man years of development time and years of working with thousands of customer application profiles to build predictive models based on how real-world applications are accessing data. EMC FAST technology is designed to make the underlying technologies and infrastructure more efficient, more dynamic, and ultimately invisible to the end user,” said Brian Gallagher, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group