Auto-Tiering

Enterprise-wide Management: Optimizes across different types of storage by dynamically choosing between fast / expensive assets (e.g., SSDs) and lower cost / higher capacity storage resources

Automated storage tiering distills down to monitoring I/O behavior, determining frequency of use, then dynamically moving blocks of information to the most suitable class or tier of storage device (SSD, Fast Disk, Capacity Disk, Gateway to Cloud Storage Provider). DataCore™ SANsymphony™-V software automatically “promotes” most frequently used blocks to the fastest tier, whereas least frequently used blocks get “demoted” to the slowest tier. Everything else floats to the middle.

Intelligent tradeoffs between cost and performance

Of course, there will be exceptions, especially when you need to assign high performance storage to an infrequently used volume, as in special end-of-quarter general ledger processing. In these cases, you can pin specific volumes (virtual disks) to a tier of your choosing, or define an “affinity” to a particular tier. Only if that tier is completely exhausted, will a lower tier be chosen.

Say the disk capacity in your data center is split among 4 classes of disks, 3 classes within your local data center and 1 or more classes located remotely for archival or backup data using Cloud based pay-as-you-go storage capacity:

• 5% Flash SSD [ Fastest, most expensive ] >> Tier 1
• 35% SAS HDD [ Midrange, modestly priced ] >> Tier 2
• 60% SATA HDD [ Lower cost, higher capacity ] >> Tier 3
• Backup or Archival Cloud Storage [ Lowest cost, highest capacity ] >> Tier N

In general, you wouldn’t want to waste the premium priced SSD capacity on infrequently used blocks, so the DataCore software will keep the least active information on the lowest cost, capacity-optimized Serial ATA (SATA) disks.

For random disk read patterns, SSDs are said to be 25 to 100 times faster than SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) at roughly 15 to 20 times higher cost per Gigabyte. In practice, SSDs substantially reduce the number of HDDs required for heavy random I/O pattern. Just one SSD PCI I/O card may yield the equivalent of 320 hard disk drives. That’s 300 times less hardware to house, maintain, cool, and watch over.

Feature Benefits