Storage Cat 08 3/10/08 17:07 Page 40
40 TIERED STORAGE
TO TIER OR NOT TO TIER?
As the credit crunch bites and we all tighten our belts, it is time
to make sure we are cutting costs not corners
Words: By Andy Hardy, VP International Sales, Compellent
The massive cost benefits of tiered storage, which is when while keeping the most-used (20%) onto high-performance FC
active data sits on expensive, fast disks and inactive data sits drives. Although not yet widely understood, the technology to
on cheap, slower disks, have been long accepted. The deliver truly automated tiered storage has been available for
unresolved issue, however, has been how to implement tiered more than four years and is being used today by organisations
storage easily, automatically and cost-effectively. such as Comic Relief, gm2 Logistics and the Royal
Traditional approaches to tiered storage were not truly Horticultural Society, to name just a few.
automated. They were full of hidden costs, typically around data Tiered storage is all about striking the right balance for each
classification and the manual movement of data between tiers, individual business; it’s the complete antithesis of the one size
which, when combined with the cost and integration of multiple fits all approach. Compellent’s tiered storage solution can be
point products, rapidly obliterated any potential savings. used as a single tier, if a customer really wants it, but of their
The complexity of managing SANs has been amplified by the 1000 customers around the world, there is not a single
need for multiple storage tiers. Most enterprise SANs have a instance where this was a driving requirement.
combination of faster (expensive) and slower (economical) disk It’s a fact of business life that not all corporate data is
drives to provide several price/performance options for data in created equally and neither does its value to the business
an effort to drive down costs. But managing a traditional remain consistent throughout its lifespan. A tiered storage
multi-tier SAN is labour-intensive because administrators approach allows companies to automatically classify and
need to analyse data usage and manually migrate data to the migrate data to the optimum tier of storage. It is the only
most cost-effective storage or risk leaving unused data on way you can constantly, and automatically, strike the perfect
fast, expensive storage. balance of capacity and performance, and in the most cost-
Perhaps unable to address the technical requirements to effective way possible, as and when your future data needs
truly automate this process, some vendors have begun grow and change.
promoting the concept of a “one size fits all” single tier of Rather than take the “one size fits all” approach, resellers
cheap storage where all data is treated equally. need to start looking at storage technologies, especially those
While the concept is nice and simple to grasp, it fails to that make the best use of multiple storage tiers by
address the fact that most UK enterprises can reap huge automatically moving data between storage tiers. If they do
benefits from automated tiered storage by putting their this then they’ll be opening their business to a raft of new,
least-used data (about 80%) onto inexpensive SATA drives and much more winnable, opportunities.
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