FAST = Fully Automated Storage Tiering from EMC.

What's up with EMC's FAST anouncement in theory this looks great. Is it?

The idea of moving lest frequent accessed data to slower disks and the small part of data that is being referenced often to faster FC or even SSD drives makes a lot of sense. And all of this online and dynamically. But at what cost? Moving data around like this makes only sense if you by doing so are able to reduce your TCO enough to make an investment in FAST technology worth your while or address performance issues that may otherwise impact your business.

Remember that the prices of FC and especially SSD drives are dropping, so maybe it even makes sense to simply host the small part of your data that requires high performance on a bunch of fast FC or SSD drives and keep the rest on SATA with a large cache in front of it.

I mean how often do you perfomance requirements change during the day??

EMC anounces FAST!

According to EMC this represents a New Era in Storage and Information Management.

Is EMC on the right track or just copying what other storage vendors have been doing for several years now.