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Furthermore, the company claims the combination of FAST, enterprise-grade flash drives and SATA drives can improve service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs by at least 20% and storage operational expenses by 40%.
Acquisition costs are reduced by minimising the number of high-performance drives required. Automatically moving newly-inactive data to slower drives frees space for fresh data.
But there's no point reducing the amount spent on hardware if all the savings go on increased staff costs to manage the process of correctly locating the data.
Once tiering policies have been established by storage administrators, FAST software monitors, analyses, and responds to changes in the value and access patterns of the data to self-optimise storage resources, EMC officials claimed.
The software also makes it possible for users to set tiering rules with or without administrator approval for every change.
Please take a FAST jump to page 2.
This allows applications to take advantage of the ultra-high performance of enterprise flash drives, while making the most of the low cost, low energy consumption, and storage density of high-capacity SATA drives.
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Additional phases of EMC's FAST technology will begin to appear in 2010. Ultimately, the company plans 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, leading to unprecedented levels of automation, management, and cost efficiencies.
"IT infrastructures are becoming increasingly complex with the growth of virtualisation and the emergence of private clouds. The dynamic nature of these environments has introduced additional challenges that require new tools to automate the management of information," said Clive Gold, marketing CTO for EMC's Australia and New Zealand operation.
"FAST automates the placement of information, increasing efficiency and lowering the total cost of ownership. Using FAST enables IT managers to focus on the service outcome, rather than being consumed by the technologies," he added.
"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," said Rich Napolitano, senior vice president and general manager of EMC's unified storage group.
"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," he added.
