Compellent’s Answer to EMC FAST Announcement

"This first iteration of FAST is available only for V-Max large enterprise customers and Clariion CX4, excluding Symmetrix and previous Clariion customers. Compellent’s Data Progression can be utilized by enterprises of any size: about 2/3 of all Compellent customers today utilize automated tiered storage with capacities ranging from 2TB to 1PB;

"A fully scalable automated tiered storage solution like Compellent’s enables customers to buy inexpensive disks while delivering greater performance at lower cost. In contrast to FAST, Compellent’s architecture provides granular intelligence about each block of data at the sub-LUN level, so that only the most active data for any application such as databases or e-mail resides on the fastest storage tier, rather than entire volumes;

"FAST does not support thin provisioning nor does it support the full suite of EMC products, which means many EMC models shipped cannot use FAST – on the other hand, Compellent integrates thin provisioning as well as boot from SAN, snapshot and replication software and makes the entire solution available to all customers;

"Because Data Progression is built-in, existing customers can enable the automated tiered storage software by simply purchasing and downloading a license key;