News summary:
* Customers have purchased 1.3 Exabytes of EMC storage enabled by the power of EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology since being introduced in January 2010 (1).
* Rapid adoption of EMC FAST technology, one of EMC's fastest-growing storage software products, demonstrates its unique ability to achieve higher levels of performance, cost-efficiency and storage utilisation in virtual data centres by exploiting the benefits of Flash drives and a tiered architecture.
* In 2011, EMC shipped more than 24 PBs of Flash drive capacity - more than any other storage vendor in the market today.
* In related news, EMC announced the availability of EMC VFCache, formally known as 'Project Lightning', which is a new hardware and software solution leveraging PCIe Flash technology and intelligent caching software that reduces latency and increases throughput - dramatically improving application performance.
Full story:
EMC Corporation has announced that the company's industry-leading EMC FAST technology, which was first introduced to the market in January 2010, has already shipped with 1.3 Exabytes of information on EMC storage solutions and represents one of EMC's fastest-growing storage software products.
This milestone clearly establishes EMC's leadership as a pioneer in Flash technology and automated tiering for enterprise storage. Delivering unmatched levels of performance, cost-efficiency, and storage utilisation, EMC's FAST software combined with Flash technology is delivering customers incredible economic savings and value. The combination of FAST software and Flash has resulted in the following achievements:
* In 2011, EMC shipped more than 24 PBs of Flash drive capacity.
* EMC has seen 8X growth in Flash capacity shipped to customers in 2011 compared to 2009.
As enterprise customers continue their journey to gain real-time intelligence out of larger and larger data sets, technologies such as EMC FAST enable customers to automatically maximise performance in transactional and analytical big data environments for faster response and query times and shorter batch windows.
In related news, EMC unveiled EMC VFCache, formerly known as 'Project Lightning', enabling a new tier of high-performance storage in the server. Together, VFCache and EMC Flash-enabled storage systems dramatically improve application performance by leveraging intelligent software and PCIe Flash technology.
Cost, efficiency benefits
EMC FAST technology moves high-performance - or 'hot' - data to enterprise Flash drives to improve application and storage system performance, and moves less active data to SAS/FC and NL-SAS/ SATA storage tiers to reduce costs. In addition to performance and cost benefits, FAST delivers heightened levels of efficiency - including lowering power and cooling expenses, while dramatically improving - and lowering - operating expenses.
The examples below are based on 1.3 Exabytes of information being managed by FAST compared to single tier or monolithic systems (2).
* Reduced data centre footprint by 64 football fields: With FAST, customers have leveraged high-performance Flash drives combined with fewer, higher-capacity drives to support more performance in smaller systems - reducing footprint requirements by more than 19 200 linear feet, or the equivalent of the length of 64 football fields.
* Saved enough power to operate 15.2 million iPads a year: Consolidating more applications into a smaller storage footprint for reduced power consumption is a key data centre requirement. FAST provides customers with an annual savings of over 556 000 000 kWh, equivalent to the energy required to power 15.2 million iPads per year.
* Eliminated over 20 million hours of manual storage administration: Automation and efficiency is a key storage requirement necessary for information growth. FAST reduces time spent on storage administration by 50%, eliminating over 20 million hours of manual storage administration - saving over US$1.1 billion in storage administration resource costs. (3)
Customer quotes
“We purchased FAST VP (Virtual Pools) to fully utilise the tiered storage in our EMC VMAX array. We know, through analysis, that only a percentage of the data in our large databases is extremely active, and that active data is a moving target. FAST VP moves the data to the proper storage tier automatically, and has resulted in a noticeable improvement in response time.”
John Saki, Lead Technical Consultant, Moen
“FAST VP helps us get the best utilisation possible from our EMC VNX unified storage solution. It's so simple, I just set the priorities and it automatically moves the data to the appropriate drive. We can manage our resources efficiently and match performance with the needs of the application, while taking almost no administrative time to do it.”
Brian Welch, Manager of Network Services, Clovis Unified School District
Industry analyst quote:
“Technologies such as EMC FAST ensure that data is automatically placed in the correct storage tier in order to provide the optimum performance - at minimum cost. Today, automated storage tiering is a powerful technology that delivers customers better control over both their capital and operating expenses, and is evolving to become a staple of storage environments. Wikibon recently published research findings which found EMC to be the functional leader for early adopter environments of automated storage tiering technology for high-end storage arrays.
“EMC has built its automated tiering technologies on a platform of being the first to integrate Flash drive technology into its enterprise storage arrays. EMC has aggressive plans to extend the high-performance Flash tiering into the server layer, with the potential to enable new categories of data-rich applications with potential transformation capabilities to improve enterprise productivity.”
David Floyer, CTO & Co-founder, Wikibon
EMC quote:
“FAST is the most disruptive, game-changing innovation in the storage industry. The technology's dramatic adoption is entirely due to IT organisations' clearly seeing - and achieving - dramatic performance and efficiency results with Flash technology.
“FAST automatically brings unmatched performance and efficiency to demanding storage environments - enabling customers to propel their business, be more agile, and deliver more performance and efficiency for managing the most critical applications and workloads. FAST is enabling our customers to transform their IT operations efficiently.”
Servaas Venter, Area Manager, EMC Southern Africa
Additional resources:
* Read Wikibon's latest research findings on automated storage tiering
* Read the ESG Lab Analysis Report about FAST VP for VMAX
* Read about FAST VP for EMC VNX
* Read about FAST VP on VMAX for Oracle environments
* Watch the Cox Communications customer video
* Read the Safe Systems customer profile and video
Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn
(1) Information managed from first quarter 2010 through the fourth quarter 2011
(2) Based on EMC calculations
(3) Based on the average System Administrator salary from Gartner IT Key Metrics Data 2011, December 17, 2010
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EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling business and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset - information - in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.
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