Tiered Storage
Overview
In a typical environment, all data is not equal in importance and/or activity. For instance, a production database may be more critical than a user's home drive or production file data may be used more frequently than archive data. Many organisations are, therefore, separating their storage infrastructures into tiers based on their business policies and service levels. The storage-purchasing model now moves to procurement based on differing service level requirements, significantly lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Despite the cost savings that can be achieved by using a tiered model, in a 2007 survey commissioned by IBM, over 70% of users questioned held all their data on a single tier of disk.
When architecting a consolidated storage environment, there is a number of key areas where the adoption of a tiered approach can significantly improve performance and reduce cost:
Disk Storage Tiers
Connectivity Tiers
Availability and Recovery Tiers
Most of the major storage vendors today sell disk and connectivity products, that provide different cost / performance components individually or within a single box. Emerging disk technologies are enabling automated, policy-driven data movement between tiers of disk.or removing the issue completely by delivering Tier 1 performance from low cost SATA disk.
Tiered storage can combine existing and new storage devices. Existing, lower performance devices may be reused for less critical tasks, particularly when
storage virtualisation is also used.
Key Deliverables
Reduce Disk Cost
Tiered storage can deliver significant cost savings. The difference in price between high performance disk and SATA disk can be over 60%
Existing, older storage devices can be reused for non-critical tasks
Reduced Connectivity Costs
The performance and cost of disk must also be related to the cost and performance of connectivity. The difference in price between high performance fibre channel connectivity and iSCSI can be over 100%
Build A Service Catalogue
A tiered storage infrastructure enables an organisation to build a Service Catalogue delivering storage resources with differentiated service levels and cost back to the business
Vendor Alliances
