New EMC FAST Technologies and Unisphere Management Software

EMC Corporation extended its midrange storage innovation with new storage efficiency technologies and new EMC Unisphere management software, enabling customers to lower costs and improve performance.

Highlights

• New advanced storage efficiency technologies for EMC CLARiiON and EMC Celerra storage systems – next generation of EMC FAST (fully automated storage tiering), innovative FAST Cache capabilities and block data compression – enable customers to lower costs and improve performance.
• New EMC Unisphere software delivers a simple approach to midrange storage management with task-based controls, customizable views, flexible reporting, and advanced self-service capabilities.
• CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems support VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) and new vCenter integration enables VMware administrators to easily provision and protect virtual machine storage.

These new EMC midrange technologies are key enablers of private clouds, helping customers manage their explosion of digital data with new levels of simplicity and efficiency.

New Advanced Storage Efficiency Technologies
As information continues to grow exponentially, storage systems need to be intelligent enough to automatically optimize for both performance and cost savings. EMC is introducing new efficiency technologies that deliver those features, including advances to EMC FAST (fully automated storage tiering), new FAST Cache capabilities, and block data compression that further extend EMC’s advantages in unified storage.

New advances to EMC FAST technology, which automates data movement within an array, now provides new levels of granular analysis and automated movement of block data at the sub-LUN level in CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems. This enables automated policies to make even better use of high performing Enterprise Flash Drives. For example, instead of moving an entire 1TB (terabyte) LUN, FAST can identify the most active data within that LUN and automatically move it to the Enterprise Flash Drives. The result is a significant increase in application performance by moving only small amounts of the most active data to Enterprise Flash Drives, while also moving the less active data to lower cost SATA drives. This is especially beneficial in VMware environments as many virtual machines and data stores may reside on a single LUN, yet may have very different performance requirements.

Additionally, new automated analysis and policy-based movement of data with EMC FAST saves time by having the storage system do the work. FAST policy options will now include ‘auto-tiering‘ based on I/O (input/output) patterns, ‘highest tier‘ for maximum performance, and ‘lowest tier‘ for best cost optimization. Integration of FAST with new EMC Unisphere software allows easy configuration and scheduling of automatic data movement. Together, these help customers increase automation for simplicity and lower operational costs.

EMC is also building upon its leadership with Enterprise Flash Drives with the introduction of EMC FAST Cache, an innovative performance optimization feature unique to CLARiiON CX4 and current Celerra NS platforms. FAST Cache uses Enterprise Flash Drives to extend existing cache capacities for accelerated system performance and automatic absorption of unpredicted spikes in application workloads. FAST Cache is a fundamental change for the midmarket, providing a multi-terabyte read and write cache, which is easily configured and monitored using EMC Unisphere. While FAST provides capacity optimization and lower costs over the long-term, FAST Cache accelerates performance to address unexpected workload spikes. FAST and FAST Cache are a powerful combination, unmatched in the industry, that provides optimal performance at the lowest possible cost.  

First to Introduce
Block Data Compression to Reclaim Capacity
EMC is further advancing its storage efficiency innovation as the first storage provider to introduce block data compression. By allowing customers to compress inactive data and reclaiming valuable storage capacity, data footprints can be reduced by up to 50 percent. A common use case would be compressing inactive data once EMC FAST software has moved that data to the most cost-effective storage tier. Block data compression joins EMC’s existing capabilities, including thin provisioning and data deduplication, to automatically and transparently maximize storage utilization.

EMC Unisphere:
A New Approach to Managing Midrange Storage
EMC Unisphere provides a new, simple and integrated experience for managing existing CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems – and next generation EMC unified storage offerings – through both a storage and VMware lens. It is designed to provide simplicity, flexibility, and automation, which are all key requirements for the journey to the private cloud.

Unisphere includes:

• A unique self-service Unisphere support ecosystem that is accessible with one-click, providing quick access to EMC’s  ‘real-time’ online support tools including live chat support, online customer communities, software downloads, product documentation, best practices, FAQs, ordering of replacement parts, and submitting service requests.
• Task-based navigation and controls for an intuitive, context-based approach to configuring storage, creating replicas, monitoring the environment, managing host connections, and accessing the Unisphere support ecosystem.
• Customizable dashboard views and reporting capabilities that enable at-a-glance management by automatically presenting users with valuable information in context of how they manage storage.  For example, customers can develop custom reports up to 18 times faster than previous methods using EMC Unisphere.

In addition to the new features above, Unisphere’s flexible design allows for additional EMC element managers to be plugged-in, providing seamless access to key storage functionality across the EMC portfolio.

New VMware API Integration
EMC’s industry leadership in VMware vStorage and vCenter integrations has continued through the advancement of vCenter plugin support. Today, EMC is also introducing unique built-in tools to more easily manage the virtual infrastructure, which build upon EMC’s portfolio of VMware aware storage management. The new tools provide a single view, from within VMware vCenter, with full transparency and integration of storage, server, and virtual machine:

• Through the use of vCenter plugins from EMC, VMware administrators have the ability to manage storage from within VMware’s vCenter management console. EMC has extended those capabilities with CLARiiON and Celerra to include provisioning of both block and NAS storage. With this next-generation vCenter plugin family VMware administrators have simplified visibility, provisioning, and management of EMC storage.
• CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems now support VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), which offloads VMware storage related functions from the server to the storage system, enabling more efficient use of server resources for increased performance and consolidation.

EMC Proven Solutions
Additionally, to help customers make more informed business decisions as they seek to reduce costs, EMC Proven Solutions will demonstrate to customers how they can leverage FAST Cache and FAST sub-LUN capabilities to help users achieve better application performance while continuing to provide IT with new ways of reducing cost and simplifying storage management in Microsoft SQL, Exchange 2010 and Oracle environments and when supporting Virtual Desktops for large numbers of users.

Availability
All capabilities included in this announcement will support CLARiiON CX4 and current Celerra NS product lines. These capabilities will be generally available worldwide in the third quarter of 2010.

"EMC is introducing significant advancements to the midrange storage space.  EMC’s unique implementation of block-based data compression can not only help customers maximize capacity in production systems, but also provides the potential for improved performance when retrieving data. The capabilities that EMC is introducing, from FAST Cache to Unisphere bring new levels of automation, simplicity, performance and ease-of-use to midrange storage – helping customers to lower costs. Combined, these are helping to change the economics for midrange platforms as they evolve in their role in private cloud infrastructures," said Brian Garrett, Vice President, Enterprise Strategy Group Lab.

"Today EMC is significantly changing how customers will be able to more easily, more efficiently and more simply manage their midrange storage environments. With an innovative new management approach and advanced efficiency capabilities, such as FAST and FAST Cache, customers can easily consolidate and optimize multiple changing workloads on a single array. The new efficiencies we’re announcing today are fundamental to EMC’s strategy of enabling customers to store, manage, protect, and secure applications and information in a policy-based and automated way to accelerate the journey to the private cloud," said Rich Napolitano, President, EMC Unified Storage Division.