FAST: Features, Drawbacks, Applications and some Questions

FAST (FULLY AUTOMATED STORAGE TIERING). FAST made a debut in the storage market yesterday (12/08/09). Finally after the market buzz we got a preview of the product in terms of its features, functionality, characteristics, possible shortcomings and use cases. This blog post focuses on the features, the drawbacks and some applications around FAST. By no means is this a comprehensive or an exhaustive list of the above.

After all, FAST makes a debut

Truly this was one of the most awaited products of 2009 from EMC after the initial announcement by EMC back in April 2009 along with the release of Symmetrix V-Max. Along with FAST, EMC has also introduced some new enhancements to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max, Clariion CX4 and Celerra NS platforms. Currently FAST will be available on the above 3 platforms at debut and will provide automated storage tiering “in-the-box” for Symmetrix V-Max, “in-the-box” for Clariion CX4 and “out-of-box” for Celerra NS platforms.

EMC Clariion Systems: Global Hot Spares & Proactive Hot Spares

The concept of Global Hot Spares has been supported in Clariion environments since the first generation of FC & CX platforms. Now the technology has been extended into the CX3 and then the CX4 platforms. The primary purpose of global hot sparing is to protect the system against disk drive failures.

EMC Clariion RAID-6 requirements and limitations

In this post, we will discuss all requirements and limitations that are associated with EMC Clariion RAID-6 Implementation.