Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1: Storage and Availability Management for Oracle (5900-1504, April 2011)

In a database environment, the access age rule can be applied to some files.
However, some data files, for instance are updated every time they are accessed
and hence access age rules cannot be used. SmartTier provides mechanisms to
relocate portions of files as well as entire files to a secondary tier.
Moving files
SmartTier enables administrators of multi-volume VxFS file systems to manage
the placement of files on individual volumes in a volume set by defining placement
policies that control both initial file location and the circumstances under which
existing files are relocated. These placement policies cause the files to which they
apply to be created and extended on specific subsets of a file system's volume set,
known as placement classes. The files are relocated to volumes in other placement
classes when they meet the specified naming, timing, access rate, and storage
capacity-related conditions.
File-based movement:
■ The administrator can create a file allocation policy based on filename
extension before new files are created, which will create the datafiles on the
appropriate tier during database creation.
■ The administrator can also create a file relocation policy for database files or
any types of files, which would relocate files based on how frequently a file is
used.
Moving sub-file objects
SmartTier enables administrators of multi-volume VxFS file systems to manage
the placement of file objects as well as entire files on individual volumes.
Using sub-file based movement you can:
■ Move a set of ranges of a specified set of files of a specified set of mounts to a
desired set of tiers on command.
■ Move segments of files using automation to:
■ Monitor a set of files for collecting I/O statistics
■ Periodically collect and persist the statistics, cluster-wide if applicable
■ Periodically enforce the ranges of the registered sets of files based on their
relative frequency of access to a desired set of tiers
■ Track the historical movements of those ranges
237Understanding storage tiering with SmartTier
How SmartTier works