Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com White Paper October 2006 Maximizing the Value of Tiered Storage © 2005-2006 Data Mobility Group. All Rights Reserved. 76 Northeastern Blvd. Suite 29A, Nashua NH 03062 Phone: 603.835.6141 Fax: 877.254.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com Executive Summary Storage tiering once meant adding a complement of SATA disk as an intermediate storage tier between high performance disk and nearline tape. Not any more. With the multiplicity of storage tiering options now available expressed in both hardware and software, storage administrators have the ability to create tiered storage environments that are optimized to their own applications and operational circumstances.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com What Exactly is Tiered Storage? Two years ago, storage tiering meant moving data contained in high performance, high availability, and higher cost disk array subsystems off to lower performance/lower cost per GB devices. Data sets that were candidates for this migration process were those whose activity levels had diminished over some predetermined period of time.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com Disk Drives Tier 1: Online Storage Tier 2: Near-Online Storage - 10-15K RPM – 7.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com Tiered Storage, Tiered Data, Unified Management Historically, significant savings can be realized from minimizing capacity growth on the gold-standard disk arrays by moving data off to higher capacity, lower cost-per-GB storage devices. Today, the challenge is to be able to do so in such a way that: • Application performance is not negatively impacted.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com For many organizations, the process of designing and deploying an effective tiered storage system can be accelerated and simplified by working with vendors who can provide a complete portfolio of storage devices, media, management software, and services as well as optimize the organization’s existing technology investments.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com Production datasets can be pared and pruned based on application-driven rules and policies using specialized applications that perform this function. The process, also referred to as active archiving, solves many of the performance and manageability challenges posed by contemporary databases that now increase in volume at the rate of 40% or more per year.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com • Data management policies based on data classification • Automated data management policy An effective tiered storage environment will incorporate storage tiers with varying cost and performance profiles, data movement software that automatically moves information to the correct tier of storage in accordance with policy and service level agreements, and storage management software that provides a holistic view of the tiered storage environment.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com for example HP StorageWorks offers a wide range of storage solutions that can deployed in a tiered storage architecture. Leveraging HP’s hardware, software, and services portfolio, incorporating a variety of storage technologies and platforms, and utilizing deep application and information management expertise, HP delivers cost effective, manageable tiered storage that meets business and IT requirements.
Data Mobility Group www.datamobilitygroup.com Data Movement Solutions Improve quality of service and reduce data management costs through policy driven automatic data discovery, classification, migration and backup – across storage tiers – based on organization policies.
