EMC FAST Fully Automated Storage Tiering for storage savings
Chuck Hollis, VP Global Marketing, CTO, EMC, describes FAST over 3 blog posts. The technology has been in Beta usage by several customers in 2009.
The premise
When you analyze the vast majority of application I/O profiles, you’ll realize that a small amount of data is responsible for the majority of I/Os; almost all of it is infrequently accessed.
The principle
Watch how the data is being accessed, and dynamically cache the most popular/ frequently accessed data on flash drives, usually the small amount, and the vast majority of infrequently accessed data on big, slow SATA drives.
The storage savings solution
| FAST | Place the right information on the right media based on frequency of access |
| Thin | This (virtual) provisioning allocate physical storage when it is actually being used, rather than when it is provisioned. |
| Small | Compression, single-instancing and data deduplication technologies eliminate information redundancies. |
| Green | A significant amount of enterprise information is used *very* infrequently. So infrequently, in fact, that the disk drives can be spun down, or at the least be made semi-idle. |
| Gone | Policy-based lifecycle management – Archiving and Deletion, Federation to the cloud through private and public cloud integration. The information can get shopped to a specialized service provider as an option |
… and life goes on!
One thing hasn’t changed, though. The information beast continues to grow
