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.

Every now and then, I like to annoy people and point out that much that we are talking about as the future in Open Systems has been done before. And today is one of those days!

With the release of EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems, EMC introduced higher density EFD’s (Enterprise Flash Disks) than being supported on its predecessor, the EMC Symmetrix DMX-4.

In this blog post we will discuss the supported drive models for EMC Symmetrix DMX-4. Right before the release of Symmetrix V-Max systems, in early Feb 2009 we saw some added support for EFD’s (Enterprise Flash Disk) on the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform. The additions were denser 200GB and 400GB EFD’s.