Monday 30 September 2013

Optimize EMC Drive Capacity with CLARiiON FAST

According to a survey from January’s Storage magazine, responding enterprises added an average of 59 TB of disk capacity and averaged total capacity of 413 TB in 2011, signaling a growing demand for enterprise data and disk capacity.EMC Drives
As disk capacity increases, how can an enterprise manage and optimize more and more data? One capacity management solution for enterprises with EMC hardware is EMC FAST. Using EMC FAST with its Unisphere interface can be an excellent way to monitor and manage EMC disk drive usage in any EMC storage environment as well as ensure data resides on the most cost-effective disks.
Optimize Disk Capacity and Performance with EMC FAST
EMC FAST adjusts data placement on a daily basis, moving ‘hot’ data to the solid-state drives, while moving ‘cold’ data to less expensive, higher-capacity SATA drives. EMC FAST is designed to help decrease latency and optimize current data hardware to allow for maximum capacity and performance.
EMC Drives for Use with CLARiiON FAST
EMC FAST will tier data on up to three levels of hardware, most likely being solid-state drives (SSDs), fibre channel drives (FC) and SATA drives.
Automatic tiering using EMC FAST can help make the most effective use of costly SSDs, while maximizing the potential cost savings that Fibre Channel and SATA drives provide. Implementing a storage solution using automatic tiering can help an enterprise get the most value from the storage they already have and limit unnecessary costs or purchases.
  • EMC Solid-State Drives: Solid-state drives are well suited for data that requires extremely high performance and low levels of capacity. SSDs provide a faster seek time than Fibre Channel because data is retrieved at memory speed, but SSD can be cost prohibitive because they can cost up to ten times more than fibre channel drives. Although SSDs for enterprises are gaining popularity, purchases of SSDs should be made carefully to ensure a suitable return on investment.
  • Using EMC FAST, frequently used or ‘hot’ data would be moved to EMC SSDs to provide the least amount of latency and seek time with the highest level of performance for demanding applications and data.
  • EMC Fibre Channel Drives: Fibre Channel can provide high levels of performance as well as cost savings over the more expensive SSDs. EMC Fibre Channel drives are capable of running demanding applications with the most intense I/O requirements. Fibre Channel drives range in size from 72 GB to 600 GB, providing fast response times and meeting performance requirements for demanding data.
  • Fibre Channel would make excellent Tier 1 or Tier 2 disk storage when planning EMC FAST tier strategies, as FC drives provide the high-level performance without the high cost associated with solid-state drives.
  • EMC SATA Drives: Providing the greatest amount of capacity at the lowest price, EMC SATA drives are excellent for storing large amounts of data. With slightly slower spin speeds than Fibre Channel drives, SATA are significantly larger than their traditional counterpart and can offer significant cost savings over SSDs and Fibre Channel options.
  • SATA drives are ideal for the lowest Tier storage when using EMC FAST. The slower, less expensive SATA drives are ideal for ‘cold’ or less-frequently used data that requires a large amount of capacity.

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