In this video, I present the shortcomings of traditional tiered storage and propose a solution: Although merely using different disk types will never deliver the goods, adding flash and cloud to an integrated, automated solution will be truly revolutionary. I look forward to the day when all of today’s buzz-worthy technologies (flash, cloud, thin provisioning, automated tiering, post-RAID) are mixed together to form a really revolutionary storage system.

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.

Have a look at this news report from Barrons.com on their Tech Trader site.  STEC shares lost a whopping 36% as quoted in the article and in fact were down almost 39% for the day.  So have solid state drives lost their sparkle?
Barrons also wrote the day before on the STEC earnings call.  The interesting parts [...]

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 [...]

Solid-state storage performance stalwart, Texas Memory Systems (TMS), has secured access to the patents and source code of SAN virtualization pioneer, Incipient, Inc. TMS will likely use this new technology to cluster and scale their storage offerings, while Incipient remains independent for now.

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 [...]

Steve Duplessie is both right and wrong in his post on SSDs. He is right that simply sticking SSDs into an array and treating them as just Super Speedy Disk can cause yet more work and heartache! Concepts such as Tier 0 are just a nightmare to manage!

HDS telegraphed that a big announcement was coming today. They even made it fun, with a (literally) cryptic blog entry to make sure we were all watching. But the announcement of High Availability Manager, a software product to manage existing HDS USP-V and USP-VM arrays, underwhelmed. It isn’t HDS’ answer to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max and it’s forthcoming FAST technology.

EMC caused a major stir on April 14 as they announced the next-generation Symmetrix enterprise storage array, the V-Max. Since that time, many of the features have been discussed and dissected on various blogs at the same time as EMC moves forward with sales of the new system. But one question remains: When can end-users actually purchase and use the V-Max system as described? And in particular, When does the V-Max get the most desirable and hyped Fully-Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and scale-out features?

EMC has been a pioneer it its Flash Drive (EFD) Technology. With the V-Max Systems EMC has taken another leap in the Flash Drive technology to support larger and denser drives. Typically with EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems you will see support for 73GB, 146GB, 200GB and 400GB EFD’s.