In this way, your costs and performance are optimized with minimal effort and no ongoing maintenance. When implementing storage tiers there are several best practices you can follow to further improve your cost savings and performance gains. Below are a few you can start with. Flash caching uses solid-state storage to hold only your most frequently accessed data. This offers significantly faster retrieval times than traditional drive storage. Traditionally, flash media has only been used for tier 1 storage.
However, advances in technology and careful use can allow you to take advantage of flash storage with lower costs than was previously available. To maximize flash caching, you can set up your system so that only your most important data ever gets transferred to the drive.
This is done by setting short time parameters for how often data must be accessed before it is moved to the flash cache tier. Disk storage is ideal for infrequently accessed data, such as backups or archives. It is resilient and high capacity but offers slower retrieval speeds. However, the bandwidth required for disk storage use, and the cost of the media can be a challenge. To reduce your costs, try to restrict disk storage to tier 2 or 3 data.
You can ensure that you get the best possible performance from your disk drives by using high RPM drives. Network performance has a huge impact on the overall performance of your storage systems. To prevent network-based bottle necks, make sure that your networks are capable of transferring the amounts of data you need at the speeds your tiers can provide. For example, if you have a scheduling conflict with backups. Ideally, networks should be designed to handle the works case scenario—full backup recovery across multiple systems simultaneously.
If your network can match the requirements of your full disaster recovery expectations, you should be good in normal situations. In the modern enterprise, storage tiering has a hybrid cloud angle. Whether data is stored on-premises or already in the cloud, the option of transferring it to cloud storage, or from the cloud to on-premise storage, is always on the table.
To utilize storage options to the fullest in a cloud environment, you need granular control over data sets, with the ability to set different SLAs and policies for each data type and class.
Perhaps there are regulatory reasons to keep it, or it might be unstructured data that has big data mining uses in the future.
Cold data like this should be stored based on low cost, with access times of minutes or hours. Except for very small businesses, manual storage tiering is almost always too impractical and time consuming to work well. Most tiered storage systems deploy automated storage tiering, moving data through the tiers automatically as it moves through its lifecycle, cooling. This kind of tier data management system software may be a standalone solution, part of a cloud storage gateway, or part of a single storage system.
However, for the purposes of this article, Tier 1 storage will refer to the storage tier with the highest performance. Tier 1 data storage is designed for data which is highly time-sensitive, volatile, and must be accessed quickly—in as close to real time as possible. For example, in a stock trading environment, where huge amounts of money can be lost in an instant, only the fastest Tier 1 storage will work.
Therefore, regardless of overall storage efficiency, at the Tier 1 level the storage media is typically very fast, solid state storage configured for the best possible performance, without regard to cost. Tier 2 data storage. Tier 2 is typically used to store transactional support data for customer-facing systems such as retail applications, and other high-performance applications where only extremely short delays will work.
A step down from Tier 1, a Tier 2 storage solution will usually utilize a more cost efficient storage system. Tier 3 data storage. Compared to Tier 1 and Tier 2, this usually means medium to high performance, high capacity hard drives at a low cost per Gigabyte stored and substantially more data.
Tier 4 data storage is where warm data from older emails and recently completed transactions goes—anything that needs to be accessed less often, but still regularly and without too much delay. Typical Tier 4 storage requirements include very large capacity and affordability, so high capacity, relatively low performance hard disk drive storage, such as SATA drives rather than high performance RAID arrays or SAS disks, are a more common solution.
Tier 5 data storage is for archiving cold data for the future. Since there is time to retrieve this kind of data and cost is the overriding factor here, cloud storage tiers, optical media, or disk and tape storage systems are great choices. Modern multi-tiered storage architectures may be simple or complex. Two tier and Three tier storage architectures still exist, and some systems include five or six tiers, including storage tiering in cloud platforms.
In a multi-tiered storage architecture, the various storage media are organized hierarchically. The highest performance storage media is Tier 0 or Tier 1, with the other tiers, Tier 2, Tier 3, and so on, following. Today it is common to see tiered storage models with five or more tiered storage levels.
Mission critical data, or hot tier data, which is frequently accessed, has to be stored on expensive and high-quality media such as flash. This ensures that data accessibility and usage will be quick and so there will be no downtime. The hot tier data can also be stored on double parity RAID or redundant array of independent disks , in order to have fault tolerance and redundancy. As the number of storage tiers increase, cheaper storage media is deployed and thus tier three can contain data which is event driven or rarely used or has unclassified files, which can be stored in tape arrays or affordable cloud storage such as Azure cool blob or AWS S3-IA, etc.
Tiered data storage architecture can range from a simple two-tier storage architecture, which may consist of iSCSI or Fibre Channel FC attached disk and tape storage, or a more complex infrastructure with five to six or maximum ten tiers. Regardless of the number of tiers, tiered storage architecture enables organizations to effectively leverage available storage resources, lower costs, and improve operational efficiency.
Tier 0 or hot tier storage is best fit for mission-critical applications with little tolerance for latency and downtime. Tier 1 storage is built to store hot data and high-performance workloads where only short delays are tolerable. Tier 2 storage is best suited for infrequently-accessed warm data such as a few days old emails, recently completed transactions, etc. It may also be used to store data needed to creating monthly, quarterly or yearly business reports.
As opposed to performance, tier 2 storage focus more on capacity and cost-effectiveness. Built for affordability and long-term retention, tier 3 storage is best suited for archiving and rarely accessed data.
Tiered storage enables business owners to effectively leverage available storage resources by storing data based on performance and capacity requirements. For example, data stored on disk drives may be transferred automatically to magnetic tape if not used for a period of months. Tiered storage may involve two tiers when the available media types are only hard drives and tapes; each of these tiers involves differences in four major attributes, that is, price, performance, capacity and function.
New technology and old technology may represent the available media types; this would dictate two tiers as each would involve differences in all four attributes.
Similarly, high performance storage devices and slower, low performance devices may also dictate two tiers. Tiered storage requirements are also determined by functional differences, such as the need for replication for security purposes and high-speed restoration of data by hard disk drive arrays.
In this case data is stored for two different functions; thus, at least two tiers would be appropriate. Two very widely used tiers, significantly divided by access speed, are the tiers of magnetic disk and tapes; another common two-tier system is magnetic disk and optical disk.
They provide software to implement the policy by automatically assigning or transferring data storage depending on changing data, frequency of use and the available storage media.
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