Yesterday, EMC announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), their much hyped and much anticipated storage feature enabling the automated moving of data between tiers of storage on a policy basis.  However the most notable missing feature in the EMC announcement was the lack of support for legacy DMX-3 and DMX-4 platforms.  This to me sends [...]

It has been an exciting month, some new details are emerging related to automated storage tiering, workload distributions, workflow automation, SLA’s, QoS and how Policy based storage management can help solve these challenges.

So, here’s my rash statement from Twitter last night: “If FAST isn’t free, I don’t want it! All it’s doing is automating process I could script/do manually”. It’s a bold statement, I know, so is FAST really offering something better than what could be achieved today using EMC’s Symmetrix Optimizer?

Simon Seagrave (http://www.techhead.co.uk/) asked, “How long do you think it’ll be before SSD will overtake SCSI as primary tier 1 SAN storage? Giving a new SSD and SATA tiered mix.”
Short answer: Yes, it will be SSDs + SAS and within 2 years.
The real quesion is when 15K RPM highspeed drives will be replaced with SSDs [...]

EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) was one of the most welcome annoucements made during the Symmetrix V-Max introduction. It would be a significant modernization of EMC’s Symmetrix line, and would be one of the first unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max line. But many, including me, were disappointed to learn in May that FAST [...]

As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, investors will start looking to get in on the act. With that in mind, a friend and I began discussing which public companies were getting into the cloud computing market and to what extent. I have put together the following list, and encourage comments, suggestions, and contributions.

EMC today announced a new generation of the flagship Symmetrix enterprise storage array by EMC: Initial reactions have compared it to the CLARiiON (with which it shares hardware), the DMX-4 (with which it shares software), the new 3PAR F-Class, the Compellent Storage Center, the HDS USP, and NetApp’s next-generation clustered filers. In every case, the V-Max is different enough to be compellingly new – it’s a true hybrid of monolithic (tiger) and modular (lion), thus its codename, “tigon”!

Wide-striping is now just another feature; it’s a very important feature but just another feature now. 3Par took wide striping and made it useable; EMC’s historic implementation using metas and hypers was painful and with the large arrays of today it becomes a full time job to performance manage an array. 3Par made it easy and much kudos to them for doing so. I think 3Par’s legacy will be the ease of management that they have brought to the Enterprise array (and thin provisioning).

Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn’t do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see!

The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets trying to get my storage layout just right, balancing the workload across every available disk.