FAST Technology Shipped With 1.3EB of EMC Storage

EMC Corporation announced that FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology, which was first introduced to the market in January 2010, has shipped with 1.3 Exabytes of information on EMC storage solutions and represents one of the firm’s fastest-growing storage software products.

EMC is a pioneer in flash technology and automated tiering for enterprise storage. Delivering performance, cost efficiency, and storage utilization, FAST software combined with flash technology is delivering customers economic savings and value.

The combination of FAST software and flash
has resulted in the following achievements:

• In 2011, EMC shipped over 24PB of flash drive capacity.
• It has seen 8X 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 FAST enable customers to maximize performance in transactional and analytical big data environments for faster response and query times and shorter batch windows.

Together, VFCache and EMC flash-enabled storage systems improve application performance by leveraging intelligent software and PCIe Flash technology.

Cost and Efficiency Benefits
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 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 (based on EMC calculations).

• Reduced data center footprint by 64 football fields: With FAST, customers have leveraged 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.
• Saved enough power to operate 15.2 million iPads a year: Consolidating more applications into a smaller storage footprint for reduced power consumption is a 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.
• Eliminated over 20 million hours of manual storage administration: Automation and efficiency is a storage requirement necessary for information growth. FAST reduces time spent on storage administration by 50%, eliminating over 20 million hours of manual storage administration-saving over $1.1 Billion (USD) in storage administration resource costs (based on the average System Administrator salary from Gartner IT Key Metrics Data 2011, December 17, 2010).

John Saki , Lead Technical Consultant, Moen Incorporated, said: "We purchased FAST VP (Virtual Pools) to fully utilize the tiered storage in our EMC VMAX array. 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."

Brian Welch, Manager of Network Services, Clovis Unified School District, said: "FAST VP helps us get the best utilization possible from our EMC VNX unified storage solution. 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."

David Floyer, CTO & co-founder, Wikibon, said: "Technologies such as EMC FAST ensure that data is automatically placed in the correct storage tier in order to provide the optimum performance-at minimum cost. Today, automated storage tiering  is a powerful technology that delivers customers better control over both their capital and operating expenses, and is evolving to become a staple of storage environments. Wikibon recently published research findings which found EMC as the functional leader in for early adopter environments of automated storage tiering technology for high-end storage arrays. EMC has built its automated tiering technologies on a platform of being the first to integrate Flash drive technology into its enterprise storage arrays. EMC has aggressive plans to extend the high-performance Flash tiering into the server layer, with the potential to enable new categories of data-rich applications with potential transformation capabilities to improve enterprise productivity."

Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer, EMC, said: "FAST is the most disruptive, game-changing innovation in the storage industry. The technology’s dramatic adoption is entirely due to IT organizations’ clearly seeing-and achieving-dramatic performance and efficiency results with Flash technology. FAST automatically brings unmatched performance and efficiency to demanding storage environments-enabling customers to propel their business, be more agile, and deliver more performance and efficiency for managing the most critical applications and workloads. FAST is enabling our customers to transform their IT operations efficiently."