From EMC's perspective, FAST is a fundamental building block in this whole process and an essential component in moving to IT as a service, a part of EMC's broader strategy of moving customers from a physical data center to a private cloud. IT as a service requires a flexible, self-managed infrastructure. To succeed, that effort requires numerous, seamless automated processes. From a storage perspective, that requires the automation of the movement of data among tiers of storage—hence the need for FAST.
EMC's goal for FAST is to get the right data to the right place at the right time with a process that is both policy-driven and data driven. Over time, the activities of scores of storage devices are collected and analyzed, resulting in policies being put in place. These FAST policies link storage "types" and "groups." A storage type is a shared, provisioned storage resource that contains a combination of storage media, say flash, FC and SATA devices. A storage group is typically an application, such as Oracle or Exchange, that interacts with storage types. FAST, then, is automation that dynamically monitors and relocates logical unit numbers (LUNs) based upon the particular needs of an application-dedicated storage group.
FAST does this first by monitoring I/O activity, such as I/O size, read density, and IOPS, at the LUN level for a period of time, the length of which is highly variable, but could be days. After enough information has been collected, FAST analyzes the data to identify candidate LUNs for relocation. Then, under complete control of the IT administrator, FAST automates the migration of the data to another tier. If the original LUN was designated as "hot," meaning that it would benefit from greater performance, the migration would be to a storage tier that can support that requirement. If the original LUN was designated as "cold," the data would be migrated to a more cost-effective storage tier whose performance should still prove adequate for the data from the original LUN.
By the way, this is not a one-time process. FAST can continue its analysis at time intervals selected by the user, such as once a day, so FAST can continue to tune and tweak the placement of data based on current user needs. Obviously, this could not reasonably be done manually, as coming back in and constantly resetting the system as conditions change would seem to be an onerous—if not nearly impossible—task.
EMC described use cases that were demonstrated at this year's VM World that demonstrated both performance and cost benefits. In the first, replacing 4 percent of the system's capacity with flash drives, an 80 percent busy system with only FC drives changed to only 25 percent busy. In addition, there was a 2.5X decrease in response time performance from 15 milliseconds to 6 milliseconds. In the second, a balanced mix of flash, FC and SATA drives delivered a 27 percent lower total cost of ownership over an all FC disk environment.
Just a couple of housekeeping notes. EMC announced that FAST capabilities will become generally available in December 2009 for the company's Symmetrix V-Max, CLARiiON CX4, and Celerra NS product lines. Also, FAST is integrated into the Symmetrix Management Console and uses a wizard for ease of use that is especially useful in virtualized storage environments. On the CLARiiON side, FAST is a host-based CLI utility that works with Navisphere Analyzer reports. On the Celerra side, FAST is an API-based solution.
EMC, along with partner Cisco, are among the leading vendors that have a strong vision of the future. Making any and all of those visions a reality will require automation, and in the IT world at least, that means policy-driven software. The company's new FAST solution is a big step forward on the software management side, as optimal (or at least close to it) allocation of data to different tiers of storage within a single array is important from both a performance and cost perspective.
While FAST should provide useful functionality for many customers, it is still a version one product. That's not bad, but by definition no version one product is completely "finished." Some unmet needs can be anticipated at this time, such as the need to identify data that should be moved at a lower level of granularity than the LUN level and EMC has pre-announced their intention to deliver sub-LUN level granularity in the second half of 2010. In any event, FAST is a very positive step in automating the migration of data to different tiers of storage for which many customers will benefit today as they continue on their path towards EMC's vision of the private cloud.
