EMC brings private clouds to midrange customers

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EMC has announced a number of new storage technologies in an attempt to ease its midrange customers into the private cloud environment.

The first is an extension of its use of Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST). This technology, which EMC has been touting for sometime, will now give users more automated movement of data to ensure blocks end up on the correct tier.

Rather than a long manual process, FAST 2 will use IOPS to decipher where the data should be - on SATA, Flash or SSD drives. By looking at IOPS, the software can sense which data is regularly accessed and which tier it needs to live on.

This new version of FAST will also enable users to provision a section of their flash storage to be solely used for cache.

The company claimed these new capabilities will increase performance of applications two fold, while also reducing response times by up to 50 per cent.

The second technology is new management software called Unisphere. The idea behind this is to bring all the separate management tools for the likes of SANs, NASs and backup into one place, simplifying management of all systems.

Finally, the company is incorporating a new VMware API which, via plug-ins, will give customers a better view of all running virtual machines, helping with provisioning, management and visibility.

Rich Napolitano, president of unified storage division at EMC, said at the company's annual conference: “When we think about driving into the next wave of infrastructure, driving into the cloud and the different parts of that journey... to allow customers to come along on that journey we need to free up resources for them.”

“We need to free up resources – people, time, dollars – to allow people to break from the past and move to the future. This is what [these technologies] do.”

All three software products will be available from July and run on EMC's existing CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems.

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