EMC Unveils FAST, Boosts And Automates Data Storage

By David Roe | Published Dec 8, 2009

EMC Unveils FAST, Boosts And Automates Data Storage Information infrastructure giant EMC (news, site) has just announced the release of the first phase of its FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology that will automate information storage across its information storage platforms.

The new technology, the second phase of which is due to be released in early 2010, aims to dramatically increase the amount of information that an organization can manage, as well as automate data flows within an organization.

Overall, EMC says the new technology will cut storage costs by 20% and storage administration by up to 40%.

Changing Storage Patterns

The introduction of FAST has all the hallmarks of a major shift in the way EMC will be storing information in the future.

The company says that it will have a significant impact on other applications across an enterprise content management system as it combines the performance abilities of enterprise flash drives with SATA disk drives, increasing application performance by as much as 800 per cent.

Combined, FAST technologies will increase storage capacity by de-duplicating information blocks and files at all levels of the system, data compression, built-in and automatic archiving, and will enable public and private cloud interaction to provide better managed and automated information management and storage.

FAST First Phase

“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,” Michael Montoya, Business CIO in EMC's internal IT organization said.

Key capabilities include:

Automation of data movement within the system through information tiering policies and based on business needs.
Automatic monitoring and response to data based on access patterns within an enterprise.
Automatic, or manual information tiering rules to support user needs.
Ability to integrate internal and external clouds to enable movement and placement of file-based and unstructured data.
Easy view of end-to-end storage and performance metrics enabling ‘pay for use’ and ‘charge back’ storage models.

While EMC has said that the second phase of FAST will be released early in 2010 it has not indicated when, or what this will consist of. Watch this space.