Tiered storage is about how business uses data, not about storage technology. The development of storage service tiers includes consideration of business use factors such as: data availability; level of restore; level of security; level of redundancy; level of concurrent use performance; and accessibility.
IT managers are in a constant battle of increasing storage requirements, and with shrinking budgets and more interest in data centres' energy and space costs, managing storage has become a difficult task.
Plenty hardware and software solutions are available to help IT managers address these challenges. The difficulty lies in choosing an optimum solution that would manage information across heterogeneous tiered architecture.
A storage solution should be a simplistic, automated solution that is equipped to handle evolution and diversity of storage.
The greatest need in a storage architecture environment is movement across tiers and placement of data within tiers. At the root of this is the ability to identify data correctly and manage policies against data to ensure that the targeted storage tiers are appropriate and available based on your company's business objective.
Most companies recognise that there is value in tiering storage, but still miss the total benefit by not using it effectively. Effective tiered storage should result in companies delivering higher performance levels, reducing storage budgets and a reduction on operational expenditure.
If there are no storage strategies in your organisation, and if storage is added organically as and when needed by existing or new projects, you may find yourself running into an environment where storage islands have been created. These storage islands can typically not communicate and share data among them, leaving you with an environment that exists as isolated islands. Creating storage tiers across these islands become virtually impossible - and you end up with an environment containing several storage silos.
These silos typically mean that there may be no cost efficiencies from bulk purchases, from better utilisation of the existing storage resources or from a unified management approach.
Looking at the future of tiered storage, it will evolve into a much more diversity. This would mean moving away from the block-based, file-based storage and the three tier levels towards what will be a reflection of main function of the tier.
Performance tier: The performance tier will include storage pools designed to deliver high level of performance. You could even associate a unique business continuity requirement or disaster recovery policy with this and the other tiers. Factors that determine performance, from a disk point of view, is spindle speed and RAID configuration. Disk drives in this category might include EFD (Enterprise Flash Disk) and 15 000 RPM drive spindles.
Balanced Tier: The balanced tier might be used to provide capacity, and associated SLAs, to applications that would live on this tier. These are typically applications that do not require exceptionally high performance or a SLA associated with a high performance storage tier. Ten thousand RPM drive spindles may typically be used to provide this storage tier. Once again, RAID level will add to the overall storage pool's performance, so careful consideration must always be taken into account when designing all storage pools, on any storage tier.
Archive Tier: The archive tier will provide active, non high-performance access, to long-term storage data. The SLA associated with this particular tier can be very flexible and customised to suit your particular requirements. These requirements might include back, replication, archiving and deduplication of data. Large capacity drives are ideal for this tier since this tier will most likely become a document or data repository ready to be archived for future used. Drives technologies that may be considered are typically SATA-2 since they provide good performance (once RAIDed) and come in very large capacity configurations, currently up to 2TB per drive. They typically spin at 7 200 RPM and a RAID 5 storage pool configuration should be more than adequate.
In the current economic climate, it has become increasingly important that IT administrators optimise their storage architecture. Most companies realise the value in the data that they keep and the benefit this could have on future growth strategies as well as profitability.
Keeping data for the sake of keeping data does not translate into any value.
With all this said, it might be difficult to assess your own storage needs and decide on the best solution. At Ubuntu Technologies we provide a storage assessment service to our clients to ensure that storage is being utilised to optimum level.
If you would like to discuss your data storage needs or asses your current solution, please contact Sarel Naude at (012) 347 7944.
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