EMC improves storage management for Clariion and Celerra

EMC has announced the simplification of its storage management interface for the Clariion and Celerra midrange storage platforms.

It has also made block-level data compression available for its Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) software.

The Unisphere management software interface, for Clariion and Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) arrays, claims to reduce the number of clicks required to perform some tasks by up to 90 per cent.

EMC said this is more suited to an active environment being virtualised and migrated into a cloud infrastructure. To help with this, VMware's vCente has been integrated with Unisphere to allow VMware managers, rather than storage administrators, to allocate storage using a few mouse clicks.

The new management software works with Clariion CX arrays using the Flare 19 operating system or with NAS 6.0, or better, on Celerra units.

The FAST software package controls hierarchical storage by moving data from solid state drives (SSDs) to slower magnetic hard disks, according to the access rates for file blocks.

Adding block data compression to this means storage space can be reduced by up to half. This makes the storage of relatively inactive data more cost-effective by freeing up more space for active data.

Previously, the software allowed only file-level compression, which meant files with active sections were uncompressed. With block-level access, the active part of a file can be stored in faster storage, whilst the rest of the file is compressed and stored elsewhere.