EMC

EMC Corp. announced Monday that the company's FAST technology, introduced to the market in January 2010, has already shipped with 1.3 exabytes of information on EMC storage solutions and represents one of EMC's storage software products.

This milestone establishes EMC's position as a provider in flash technology and automated tiering for enterprise storage.

Delivering high levels of performance, cost efficiency, and storage utilization, EMC's FAST software combined with flash technology is delivering customers incredible economic savings and value. The combination of FAST software and flash has resulted in 2011 with the shipping of over 24 PBs of flash drive capacity, and the company has seen eight times growth in flash capacity shipped to customers in 2011 compared to 2009.

As enterprise customers continue their journey to gain real-time intelligence out of larger and larger data sets, technologies such as EMC FAST enable customers to automatically maximize performance in transactional and analytical "Big Data" environments for faster response and query times and shorter batch windows.

EMC also unveiled on Monday EMC VFCache, formerly known as "Project Lightning," enabling a new tier of high performance storage in the server. Together, VFCache and EMC flash-enabled storage systems improve application performance by leveraging software and PCIe flash technology.

EMC FAST technology moves high-performance—or "hot"—data to enterprise flash drives to improve application and storage system performance, and moves less-active data to SAS/FC and NL-SAS/ SATA storage tiers to reduce costs. In addition to performance and cost benefits, FAST delivers heightened levels of efficiency, including lowering power and cooling expenses, while improving and lowering operating expenses. The below examples are based on 1.3 exabytes of information being managed by FAST compared to single tier or monolithic systems. It also reduces data center footprint by 64 football fields. With FAST, users have leveraged high-performance flash drives combined with fewer, higher-capacity drives to support more performance in smaller systems, reducing footprint requirements by more-than 19,200 linear feet, or the equivalent of the length of 64 football fields.

EMC FAST technology helps to save enough power to operate 15.2 million iPads a year, by consolidating more applications into a smaller storage footprint for reduced power consumption is a key data center requirement. FAST provides customers with an annual savings of over 556,000,000 kWh, equivalent to the energy required to power 15.2 million iPads per year. It also eliminates over 20 million hours of manual storage administration. Automation and efficiency is a key storage requirement necessary for information growth. FAST reduces time spent on storage administration by 50 percent, eliminating over 20 million hours of manual storage administration, saving over $1.1 billion in storage administration resource costs.

"We purchased FAST VP (Virtual Pools) to fully utilize the tiered storage in our EMC VMAX array,” said John Saki, lead technical consultant, Moen Inc. “We know, through analysis, that only a percentage of the data in our large databases is extremely active, and that active data is a moving target. FAST VP moves the data to the proper storage tier automatically, and has resulted in a noticeable improvement in response time," he added.

"FAST VP helps us get the best utilization possible from our EMC VNX unified storage solution,” said Brian Welch, manager of network services, Clovis Unified School District. “It's so simple, I just set the priorities and it automatically moves the data to the appropriate drive. We can manage our resources efficiently and match performance with the needs of the application, while taking almost no administrative time to do it," Welch added.