EMC pulls a Fast one with Clariion storage arrays

EMC claims that automated storage reduces provisioning time by 95 per cent

EMC is to refresh its Clariion midrange storage arrays later this year with new automation capabilities designed to help storage administrators manage growing amounts of enterprise data.

The storage firm made the announcement at its annual EMC World customer and partner event in Florida.

Rich Napolitano, information storage business senior vice president at EMC, said that the Clariion update is the next step in the company's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (Fast) strategy.

EMC delivered Fast enhancements to its Celerra unified storage systems in April, and said at the time that the V-Max modular version of the Symmetrix disc arrays would be given similar capabilities.

Banjamin Woo, an enterprise storage analyst at IDC, suggested that many customers have no idea what data they are storing or why they are storing it. "When storage is automated, it takes a lot of liability out of the administrators' hands," he said.

The analyst described EMC as "very clever" in introducing the capabilities in the Clariion arrays ahead of its other storage offerings, "because the mid-market is where the big storage challenges lie".

Woo added that, after EMC had introduced Fast across its target product range, it would probably focus on making the provisioning even more granular.

However, while EMC appears to be ahead of the game in introducing automated capabilities, the firm is likely to experience a certain amount of hesitation in take-up by IT departments. Customers attending EMC World registered their concerns over the reliability of automated systems.

Woo maintained that there will be reliability issues around storage automation simply because it is new. "For the last 30 years storage has all been about brute force, and now administrators have to trust machines to do it. That's a big leap for them," he said.

Napolitano promised that EMC would arm concerned customers with software, such as ControlCenter, that has the management capabilities and visibility into virtual environments to guard against reliability problems.

Denny Cherry, a database administrator at web application development company and EMC customer Awareness Technologies, said that while he was not planning to use the automated storage provisioning, he was looking forward to other features that are set to be added to the Clariion arrays, such as auto spin down functionality, Flash technology and VMware ESX Server integration.

Last month EMC announced a new line of its Celerra unified storage systems, boasting integrated network attached storage, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity, as well as inactive file compression capabilities to remove duplicate copies from the file system.

The key feature of the new Celerra line-up is that it can provision data storage automatically because of its mixed support for Flash and low-power SATA II drives, and through new Celerra plug-ins that integrate the systems with VMware environments.

EMC used the term 'Fast' when launching Symmetrix V-Max, the first arrays to incorporate EMC's Virtual Matrix Architecture.

The architecture allows EMC customers to support thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated infrastructure. V-Max engines interconnect to share resources, a feature that gives them three times the performance and capacity as the Symmetric DMX-4, the firm claims.

The engines allow customers to automate the movement of data between three tiers of storage: Flash drives; Fibre Channel disc drives; and SATA II drives.

EMC claimed at the time that the automated storage capabilities would reduce the time and complexity of provisioning by 95 per cent.