3Par Policy Advisor Announced

[Richard Siemers]

Both 3Par and EMC have announced automated storage tiering products in December 2009. 3Par calls theirs "Policy Advisor" while EMC has dubbed theirs "FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering").

If you're reading this forum, then I assume you already understand that these new features are designed to dynamically promote or demote LUNs from one tier of storage to another within the same storage frame, something that Compellent has been doing for quite some time now.

Both 3Par and EMC are adding these features for free. However 3Par bears an expensive caveat that Dynamic Optimizer must be licensed first, which is capacity priced per system (by drive magazine). EMC's equivalent of Dynamic Optimizer is called Virtual Lun Migrator which is a base feature included in both Clariion and Symmetrix.

Just for reference, EMC has a product called Symmetrix Optimizer which is a premium feature that is comparable to 3Par's System Tuner, also a premium feature. Both apps identify hot spindles in the storage frame and relocate data to diversify the work load, aka iops/mbps, across all spindles. This is different than "wide striping" which distributes the data by capacity across spindles.

I would like to see Dynamic Optimizer provided as a base InForm feature like EMC does.