Maintaining high performance is a top concern for companies that rely on critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL, Oracle and VMware View.

As companies move towards hyper-consolidated virtualised environments and the private cloud, it's even more critical to consider functionality that can not only adjust performance, but also automate processes that were once manual.

With EMC FAST and FAST Cache you can:

■ Execute a cost-effective storage tiering strategy without manual intervention
■ Reduce total cost of ownership by intelligently utilising Flash and SATA drives
■ Provide the most efficient balance of performance and cost savings
■ Significantly improve VMware View response times and scale solutions further

■ Workloads change dynamically
■ Hot data is promoted to highest tier
■ Cold data is demoted to lowest tier

EMC FAST
Measure, balance, and rebalance application workloads across several disk tiers. FAST can redistribute hot, warm, and cold workloads onto Flash, Fibre Channel, and SATA drives.

FAST is especially valuable for optimising long-term data placement, especially when work-loads are unpredictable and vary from week to week. FAST is almost like having a SAN expert constantly providing regular health checks at the intervals you prefer and automatically rebalancing workloads when it makes most sense.

■ Large, non-volatile storage cache
■ Real-time reaction to workload peaks
■ Enables faster performance optimisation

EMC FAST Cache
While FAST provides you with ongoing performance optimisation and data movement recommendations, adding FAST Cache is like getting a system-wide boost in performance and efficiency. FAST Cache provides an immediate performance benefit to random workloads by holding a large percentage of the most frequently used data in high-performance Flash drives, thus reducing the required I/O from rotating drives.

It's one of the easiest ways to increase system-wide performance - simply add Flash drives and mark the devices as FAST Cache. Once enabled FAST Cache monitors incoming I/O for access frequency. If the data meets the criteria for promotion, it's copied into FAST Cache and the promoted data continues to serve host reads and writes from the Flash drives.

How to get EMC FAST and FAST Cache

A common use case is to apply FAST and FAST Cache in front of FC and SATA drives. This enables warm and cold data to be moved between FC and SATA tiers while the hottest data will reside in FAST Cache.

For EMC CLARiiON CX4 and Celerra NS-120 and above storage arrays

■ Upgrade to FLARE 30 (free upgrade covered by maintenance)
■ Purchase additional Flash drives for FAST Cache (2x100GB for CX4-120/NS-120)
■ Purchase enabler for FAST Cache and/or FAST

For legacy EMC CLARiiON/Celerra and 3rd party storage arrays

■ Upgrade to an EMC Celerra unified storage array
■ Purchase Flash drives and FAST enablers and maximise the use of low-cost SATA drives
■ Arrange buy-back on existing storage array (if appropriate)

View further EMC Celerra details >>