EMC FAST Technology Represents New Era in Storage and Information Management

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The News

HOPKINTON, Mass. – December 8, 2009 – EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today outlined its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) vision and announced delivery of its first technology to revolutionize the way storage is managed.  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. 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. EMC’s FAST technology ensures that the right information is in the right place at the right time and is optimized for both highest performance and lowest cost.  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. 

With the ongoing growth of information and the new requirements of the emerging dynamic virtual data center and private clouds, IT organizations require new tools that provide the automation and simplification necessary to deliver IT as a service. EMC’s FAST technology represents a major inflection point in the storage industry and will transform the way information infrastructures are built and used by IT organizations. 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.

“Our move to EMC Celerra unified storage systems has made our information infrastructure more cost effective and has improved application performance, which translates to better service for our clients.  As a large and growing law firm, we deal with all types of information that is critical to our business and has to be available when needed. Celerra’s automated tiering capabilities will maximize our capacity utilization by placing infrequently accessed large document files on SATA drives, while our Exchange and SQL data is on enterprise flash drives and Fibre Channel drives all within the same system. This will also enable us to have a single business continuity strategy with its own levels of automation and ability to meet strict recovery point objectives.”
- Brian Bosserman, Network and Systems Operations Manager at Foster Pepper, one of the largest law firms in the U.S. Pacific Northwest

“Storage tiering has traditionally been a manual, resource-intensive process.  With automated tiering, we can apply consistent policies across the enterprise in order to place application data on the appropriate media. In implementing flash technology, we’re looking for any advantage that enhances our ability to place only the most intense workloads on that tier. FAST technology will ensure that our flash drives are servicing the workload for which they are suited.”
- Tom Gregory, Senior Systems Engineer at Florida-based Raymond James Financial, which served as an EMC FAST beta site and utilizes EMC Symmetrix and CLARiiON storage systems to support more than 5,300 financial advisors and approximately 1.9 million accounts

“EMC IT beta tested EMC’s FAST technology with its Symmetrix V-Max system to enable tiering and virtualization of its storage platform.  Implementation of automated storage tiering is a key enabler of a project underway to make our 6.5 petabyte storage infrastructure as efficient as possible while providing the highest levels of service to more than 40,000 employees worldwide. This will enable us to increase storage utilization to the targeted 75 percent, improve application performance by optimizing the data to the right type of drives and improve storage administration through automated tiering.  Additionally, we’ve reduced our energy costs, data center footprint and operational efficiency, enabling our administrators to each manage significantly more information than they were able to when tiering processes were all manual.”
- Michael Montoya, Business CIO in EMC’s internal IT organization

“Automated storage tiering removes a large burden from IT administrators.  The sheer number of combinations of applications, servers, network connections, and storage capacity found in virtual data centers makes it almost impossible to efficiently manage such a dynamic environment manually. EMC has been methodically acquiring and developing innovative software solutions to place it at the leading edge of a major trend in automating data center processes to deliver both business benefit and maximum return on IT investments.”
-Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group

“Over the past two years, EMC has optimized all of its major storage architectures to support new levels of automation required in virtual data center environments and for the transition to private clouds. These dynamic and agile environments require the capabilities that EMC’s FAST technology provides for effective management and scaling.  This is an area of significant investment for EMC and we are the only one offering this technology across high-end, mid-tier and unified platforms.”
- Pat Gelsinger, EMC President and Chief Operating Officer, Information Infrastructure Products

“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.” 
- Brian Gallagher, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group

“Managing the explosive growth in file, unstructured and object-based data is a major challenge. Doing it without meaningful automation and policy management  is nearly impossible. EMC’s FAST technology allows customers to move and tier this data within a system, across system types, or into the cloud.  This not only provides a range of new archive approaches, it also dramatically simplifies the management of unstructured data at scale.”
- Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMC’s Unified Storage Group

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