Some call it "fun," but building tiered storage is all about business...applications, and regulatory requirements.

What happens when an organization's application requirements change? In those instances, data can be migrated between storage tiers and reassigned to be stored in the most efficient locations. According to Tony Asaro and Brian Garrett of Enterprise Strategy Group, "Moving data to more cost-effective tiers of storage as it ages can reduce the overall cost of storage capacity. Another reason to use tiered storage is to better optimize the storage infrastructure. Why keep data running on the fastest tier of storage if it does not require high performance? Even if the data is frequently accessed and mission-critical, it may not benefit from residing on fast (and expensive) 15,000 RPM FC disks."

Tiered storage is fundamental to many Services Oriented Storage SolutionsT solutions. By deploying the Hitachi TagmaStore� Universal Storage Platform or Network Storage Controller as the foundation of a tiered storage environment, you can virtualize your storage infrastructure, simplify management, and reduce costs throughout the storage network. Using Hitachi HiCommand� Tiered Storage Manager, Hitachi Universal Volume Manager, and Hitachi Virtual Partition Manager software, you can configure, manage, and move data across the entire storage pool-including volumes on other vendors' storage systems-from a "single pane of glass."

Migrating data is easy with transparent, nondisruptive data volume movement. Tiered Storage Manager software targets cost-efficiency. By transparently and interactively migrating data between heterogeneous storage tiers, you can match application quality of service requirements to storage system attributes. Then, as needed, you can migrate less critical data to lower-cost storage systems, resolve performance, capacity, and usage bottlenecks, manage equipment lease expirations and upgrades, and retire systems that are costly to operate.

No need to "go it alone." These services get tiered storage off the ground. Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS) delivers a Tiered Storage Planning and Design Service to align the characteristics of storage to application requirements. Consultants assign initial and appropriate storage tiers to balance resource utilization and satisfy defined service-level objectives for the data. And they design a data migration plan across all tiers to minimize application downtime and maximize data availability based on the storage tier assignment.

The GSS Implementation Service for Tiered Storage delivers on the data conversion plan created in the prerequisite Tiered Storage Planning and Design Service. This includes implementation of the storage system layout and LUN configuration, the storage tiering design, Virtual Partition Manager cache design, and data migration and virtualization. Additional tools and services are made available as needed.

Recommended Reading: Tiered Storage White Paper

Tiered Storage Economics: Defining and Calculating the Economic Benefit of Tiered Storage Solutions

This paper examines trends observed by Hitachi Data Systems consultants and IT analysts, which indicate that purchasing only cheaper disk solutions to reduce short-term capital expense can produce a negative long-term impact on operating expense. It then considers multitiered storage, a method of incorporating cheaper disk technology into a comprehensive tiered storage architecture, which can effectively reduce both capital and operating expense, while providing the levels of service necessary in today's complex and evolving storage infrastructures. View PDF

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