With FLARE 30 on the verge of release I thought it would be a great time to discuss the amazing benefits it has to offer and how its totally changing the game when it comes to storage and the mindset of how its used.<!--more-->

What is FLARE you ask? FLARE is short for Fibre Logic Array Runtime Envionment and in very basic terms is the upgradable code that sits on the first 5 drives of a Clariion Array. FLARE 30 simply put is the latest great version of the code that allows for some great new features. With the introduction of FLARE 30 EMC has totally changed the game when it comes to virtual provisioning. Storage Pools get a facelift from previous versions of FLARE, with FLARE 30 comes the ability to "pool" all types of disk including FLASH. Previously storage pools were available but you were limited to pooling on all FC drives or SATA drives. Long story short, if you wanted to pool all of you drives of various types into one huge pool you now have the ability to do so. One huge benefit of storage pooling that most users will definitely want to take advantage of right away is Fully Automated Storage Tiering or (FAST). FAST takes some of the load off of the administrator by not requiring them to constantly have to worry about performance relating to which disks data is stored. FAST basically slices up the LUN inside of your pools into 1GB slices and moves them around based upon the utilization. A great scenario would be SQL. Suppose you have a very large database sitting on your CX4... FAST has the ability to see that database and decide what is being used heavily and what isn't getting used so much. It will then move the stagnant data to the slower disks and move the busy data to higher performance disks based upon exactly how busy they are. This is a huge step in the right direction to guarantee performance with little effort on the administrator's part.

Aside from storage pooling and FAST architecture there are other improvements. Thin provisioned LUNs can now be shrunk without having to deal with metaluns and now we have the introduction of FAST Cache. We all know that Solid State Drives (SSD's) are pricey and in some aspects administrators do not notice an immediate impact in performance, but with FAST cache that's all about to change. Fast Cache will have the ability to handle any unexpected IO spikes, or easily handle even your busiest of workloads. Configuration is a piece of cake as well. Just a few clicks and you are on your way to lightning fast read and writes.