On December 8, 2009, EMC outlined its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) vision and announced delivery of its first technology to revolutionize the way storage is managed. EMC is delivering automation capabilities across all primary EMC storage platforms to help IT organizations manage strong double-digit annual information growth. EMC FAST technology automates the movement of data within a storage system, replacing hours or even days of repetitive, manual storage administrative tasks. An average system configuration with a combination of EMC FAST technology, enterprise flash drives and SATA disk drives, can deliver higher service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs by at least twenty percent and lowering storage operational expenses by forty percent. EMC's FAST technology will serve as the foundation for integrating all of its leading storage efficiency and automation capabilities, allowing IT organizations to manage more information more efficiently in a smaller footprint, use less power and cooling, and lower storage capital and operational costs.
It combines the performance benefits of enterprise flash drives, which can increase application performance by as much as 800 percent for active data, with the cost benefits of high capacity SATA disk drives, which can lower cost-per-megabyte by as much as 80 percent for inactive data. With the ongoing growth of information and the new requirements of the emerging dynamic virtual data center and private clouds, IT organizations require new tools that provide the automation and simplification necessary to deliver IT as a service. EMC's FAST technology represents a major inflection point in the storage industry and will transform the way information infrastructures are built and used by IT organizations. EMC's vision for FAST is to combine capabilities including sub-LUN tiering, capacity allocation on demand, block and file level deduplication, data compression, disk drive spin down, built-in archiving, and private and public cloud federation to provide unprecedented levels of automation, management, and cost efficiencies.