EMC Software Guide for CLARiiON Environments

Whether an enterprise needs to improve the performance of applications, automate storage tiering, or simply adapt to growing amounts of data, EMC software can provide the solution.
EMC Software and Solutions
EMC software can improve the performance of enterprise CLARiiON storage environments. Here’s a guide for choosing the right software to fit the needs of the enterprise.

• Want to Implement Automatic Storage Tiering?
EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) helps users get more performance and value from their disk drive capacity. EMC FAST places frequently used data on the highest performing drives (such as EMC fibre channel drives), while using high capacity drives (like EMC SATA Drives) to store less-frequently used data. EMC FAST reduces administrator workload by automating data movement tasks, and is managed and monitored by the Unisphere interface.

• Need to Improve Application Performance?
EMC CLARiiON FAST Cache provides application acceleration of up to 200% in some cases. Adding solid-state drives, also known as enterprise flash drives, extends the existing cache capacity to make activity “spikes” in application workloads more manageable. The extra cache helps to absorb these increases in application workload and improves overall application performance.
Note: As an alternative, adding spindles to an array can often help improve application performance in a more effective manner.

• Need to Reclaim Disk Capacity?
Storage managers can reduce their data footprint by up to 50% with EMC CLARiiON Block Data Compression. EMC CLARiiON Block Data Compression compresses cold or inactive data, usually found in backup copies and archives. Compression can help reduce capacity needs and power costs by eliminating redundant data, and works in the background to minimize any impact on system performance.

• Want to Simplify Growth Management?
EMC Virtual Provisioning allows administrators to provision data into pools to be thin or thick. Thin provisioning allows for greater capacity utilization, while thick provisioning allows for greater speed and performance. Additionally, EMC Virtual Provisioning can be used in combination with EMC FAST to utilize all storage tiers and disk drive protocols.