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by Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing — February 22, 2008 |
We hope you’ve all been following the
launch of Compellent's Storage Center 4.0. We’re excited about all of the upgrades we've made and the potential the product has to impact the storage market . We've noticed from some of the articles that have run have compared one of our new features, Fast Track, to solutions already on the market, like
this article. And to that, we’d like to take a couple of moments to provide some additional clarity on our Fast Track feature:
- Fast Track provides benefits far beyond short stroking. Fast Track does provide performance benefits similar to short stroking since data is written to the outer zones of the drive. However, Fast Track goes beyond short stroking by utilizing the full capacity of the drive as inactive data is placed on the inner tracks. All the benefits without the high cost of short stroking.
- Fast Track is fully automated and dynamic. The storage admin sets up the volume once through a few clicks and never touches it again. All blocks are analyzed daily to determine frequency of access. The most active blocks are moved to outer zones and inactive blocks are moved inward, automatically.
- Fast Track operates at the block level rather than a volume level. By working inside the volume, only the small portion of a volume that has the highest activity will be moved. Other storage products operate at the volume level, which requires movement of the entire volume.
- Fast Track leverages Thin Provisioning. This is very important since only the actual data is committed to the disk. Some vendors that lack thin provisioning must write the entire volume to the outer edge of the disk. Since only 20% of the total capacity provides the highest performance, a thick provisioning volume will typically consume more than just the outer zones, eliminating any potential performance gains.
Let us know what you think about Fast Track, Thin Import and other features of the new release.