EMC updates backup and mid-market storage lines

EMC's FAST v2 update prioritises high-demand files

EMC World 2010: EMC has updated its enterprise backup and mid-market storage range with two technologies which the company believes will dramatically accelerate storage and backup.

The company has introduced a software tool known as Data Domain Boost that allows administrators to optimise the connection between the client server and backup server.

"We were always limited by the language used to move the data from the target server to the storage," said Frank Slootman, president of EMC's backup recovery systems division.

"We are unclogging this massive fire hose that exists between the file server and the backup server."

EMC estimates that overall Data Domain performance can be boosted by some 50 per cent, while the use of bandwidth on the backup server can be cut by 80 to 99 per cent.

Data Domain Boost will be available for EMC's NetWorker backup tool as well as backup systems from Symantec.

Slootman stressed that the software is not an exclusive offering for EMC, and that it welcomes talks with other backup vendors to use the software.

EMC has also unveiled an update to the Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) system for the mid-market storage space.

The virtualised storage tool allows SATA, Fibre Channel and solid-state drives to be viewed as a single storage unit with the most widely requested code placed in the fastest storage medium.

The FAST v2 update prioritises high-demand files, and allows the highest priority bits of code within a file to be placed into a high-speed storage platform.

The tool also allows portions of solid-state drives to be allocated as a disk cache to further speed performance.

EMC estimates that the FAST v2 system results in a 35 per cent drop in file system workload times, and in some cases doubles the speed of SQL Server performance.