3PAR has been designing and marketing it's agile storage for years. Recently, Hitachi started using the word "agile" in their messaging. Imitation is a form of flattery, but at least they should link to our Cloud Agile partner page when they plagiarize like that.
In contrast, EMC's announcement of FAST today only uses the word agile once, in Pat Gelsinger's quote:
“Over the past two years, EMC has optimized all of its major storage
architectures to support new levels of automation required in virtual
data center environments and for the transition to private clouds.
These dynamic and agile environments require the capabilities that
EMC’s FAST technology provides for effective management and scaling.
This is an area of significant investment for EMC and we are the only
one offering this technology across high-end, mid-tier and unified
platforms.”
- Pat Gelsinger, EMC President and Chief Operating Officer, Information Infrastructure Products
Online data movement is a big deal for storage and FAST puts it squarely in the mainstream of storage software. Gelsinger is right about virtual environments being dynamic and agile, but the problem with FAST is that the underlying storage does not measure up and FAST shines a spotlight on those shortcomings. If you are going to have online data movement, you need to have the ability to make the results of those data movement operations productive - without turning your storage utilization goals upside down. FAST undoubtedly will work great where EMC storage is under-utilized and very expensive, but how will it work when you are trying to reduce the cost of storage by increasing storage utilization?
It also looks like EMC is backing away slightly from their bullish position on SSDs. I was wondering how they were going to deal with their disappointing SSD sales when they finally announced FAST.
Speaking of bullish, I found this little video that I thought I'd share with you of some truly agile guys that really know their bull!
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