EMC officially announced FAST (Fully automated Tiered Storage) for their Symmetrix arrays nearly one year ago but you can find first pre-announcements dated nearly two years ago!
Yesterday, HDS announced the availability of HDT (Hitachi dynamic tiering) on their shiny new VSP.
Months ago, IBM announced the availability easy tiering on their DS8000.
Last spring, 3Par (now HP) announced the availability of autonomic storage tiering.
Years ago, Compellent announced the availability of Data Progression.
All the software features mentioned here are different flavours of sub-LUN level automated tiered storage.
At the time I’m writing this post, EMC hasn’t already announced the first usable (sub-LUN tiering) version of FAST for their Enterprise arrays.
It’s a little bit ridiculous: very fast to announce new features but very slow to deliver them.