Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 Solutions Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

Chapter
3
Tiered storage solutions
The typical requirements of enterprise-level storage management are to store
and reliably maintain data from a number of different sources, such as
inventory, customer, billing, business intelligence and personnel records. Such
data is usually stored in file systems on several host systems.
Much enterprise data is mission-critical, and it must be stored so that it is
readily available for secure update and retrieval by staff over the internal
network, and by customers over the Internet. However, storing all an
enterprise’s data in the same way is expensive, and so it is usual to store data
that is not mission-critical on media that are cheaper and perhaps less readily
accessible.
Storage tiers establish quality of storage service (QoSS) criteria that allow an
enterprise’s data to be organized with varying degrees of availability and
performance on storage with varying degrees of performance, accessibility and
cost.
The following table shows typical criteria for organizing storage tiers according
to cost and benefit.
Cost Benefit Application
High High
Mission-critical business data to which employees and
customers need frequent, fast, reliable access. These files are
stored on high-end storage arrays with fast, reliable network
connections.
High Low
Data that is not directly related to an enterprise’s business,
but which nevertheless must be retained. Examples are
compliance reports and employee HR records. These files are
stored on high-end arrays, but performance is not a priority.