There's a new functionality on the horizon with EMC Storage Arrays and the way that they handle their data. The standard way to provision storage has always been to size your performance requirements correctly and statically assign a RAID Group with a certain number of disks running either SATA or Fibre Channel, and most recently EFD (Electronic Flash Drives).
With FAST, the goal is basically to allow EMC customers to get the best value out of their storage. This works by letting the array automatically provision and re-provision data to the most appropriate storage tier based on performance requirements.
Take a look at this video to see how the performance increases using FAST and EFDs. The example is using Symmetrix, however, note that it mentions that their medium class (CLARiiON) and NAS class (Celerra) arrays will be supported as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofKBDvo8214
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Note that EMC is moving an entire LUN. There's a certain amount of overhead associated with moving a whole LUN. When does EMC propose this LUN movement take place? Is this scheduled? Is it automatic? Is this a real-time analysis or is it scheduled? There are a LOT of questions around FAST today. I wouldn't expect anything worthwhile on this front in the Clariion for at least 2 years.
ReplyDeleteBob
ReplyDeleteI'm hearing that we will see FAST with CLARiiON sometime in 2010 and that it will be closely integrated with virtual provisioning. Also, with EMC's Virtual LUN technology, there shouldn't be any disruption to host I/O. Virtual LUNs have been available since FLARE 16. I am interested in learning what impact several LUN migrations throughout the day would have on the CPU and Cache requirements of the array itself.