Automated tiering the advanced data backup solution for enterprises
Automated tiering is a technology that enables users to optimize storage utilization and achieve significant cost savings. Storage tiering is a common practice in today’s IT environment to achieve required service levels at minimum costs. Cloud storage solutions provide automated services which allow you to have advanced data storage solutions. Businesses assign different types of data to different types of storage media. Without automated features this traditional way of tiering causes significant problems. When data characteristics change over time, users need to manually migrate data. Migrating data to another media often involves downtime and much management effort.
How automated storage tiering works?
Automated storage tiering is a single storage pool which can be divided into tiers which feature different drive types.
Storage tiering:
For example there are four tiers available. The highest tier, tier 0 features the highest performance level. With performance gradually declining towards lower tiers the tiered structure comes with a default configuration that is designed to help users get the most out of their system. Assigning applications to the right tier ensures that they have access to the performance levels they require. These tier configurations can be changed by users according to their own application. The applications that require higher performance levels feature high workloads and do not have significant cost considerations can be assigned to higher tiers. Non mission-critical applications, may feature with lower workloads and not need high performance levels from a cost per performance standpoint, these applications could be best assigned to lower tiers. Data present in the storage pool automatically migrates between different tiers based on a system embedded algorithm. This algorithm takes into account the age of the data that is, how long the data has been present within the storage system and the frequency with which the data is used.
Working of automated tiering:
If data blocks in tier zero have been idle for a long period of time system will migrate these data blocks to lower tiers. By contrast, if the storage system detects high activity levels of the lower tiers, these data blocks will be promoted. Without automatic data migration data would always remain on the same storage media it was first created on and had to manually move to another storage media.
Benefits of Automated Storage Tiering:
There are some of the key considerations one can have when adopting storage tiering:
Longer system lifespan:
Automated storage tiering can generate significant advantages, If storage space is more efficiently used storage systems will have a longer lifespan. This protects your investment and increases your return on investment.
Reduce data footprint:
More efficient storage utilization also means more can be done with storage space reducing storage footprint and lowering power consumption.
Low management:
Storage tearing many of these operations are done automatically reducing time. Administrators have to spend on storage management and thus lowering management costs.
The increasing proliferation of information has resulted in continuous growth of data for organizations of all sizes. This has caused a dramatic increase in storage utilization which has a negative impact on costly primary storage as it approaches its capacity limit. Cloud backup solutions provide automated services which allow you to have storage in a smarter way.
