As data volumes continue to increase at an exponential rate, businesses are faced with having to add additional storage capacity to manage this growth. For many, data is growing faster than budgets. Yet when it comes to data storage they still pursue the costly approach of storing all business data, whether mission critical or not, on expensive, high performing disks.
When data is created it goes through a lifecycle with varying degrees of activity. When it is first created it is accessed frequently, changed, updated and reviewed on a daily basis. As it ages and becomes less relevant it can become static or non-essential.
In order to reduce total storage cost, tiered storage matches storage requirements with changes in the frequency of data access and importance. Using varying levels of drives, it assigns different categories of data to different storage disks. Mission critical and active data, where response times and performance are the most important criteria, are held on high performance ‘Tier 1’ storage disks.
All other data that is rarely used can be stored in low cost, high capacity ‘Tier 2’ storage environments. These disks don’t have the same performance capabilities and are therefore less expensive than the ‘Tier 1’ alternatives. They significantly reduce energy use and free up capacity on the more expensive and higher performing storage tiers. As a result businesses can massively reduce storage costs as they no longer need to purchase expensive disks to manage the growing data volumes.
Businesses can massively reduce storage costs as they no longer need to purchase expensive disks to manage the growing data volumes
Datapac is an EMC premier partner in Ireland and the company is one of the main innovators in this area. We’ve worked with a number of existing and new customers to implement and monitor tiered storage solutions with proven results.
We carry out analysis of customer’s data to discover what is ‘hot’ or mission critical and regularly used data and what is not. We look at data skew. If there is a skew of 90 per cent, it means that 90 cent of the input/output (IO) takes place within 10 per cent of the storage capacity. Tiering facilitates the promotion of this data up onto low capacity high performing drives.
Many businesses are extremely surprised by the cost savings they can achieve by moving to a tiered storage environment. We can set up rules and policies to automatically move active and inactive data to the most appropriate storage tiers.
Any business in the design stage or in the process of upgrading to a new storage solution should explore tiered storage. It is a much more informed way of expanding your storage options and reduces the total cost of ownership.
Once a business has implemented tired storage they quickly get to see the benefits from a cost point of view, as well as improved business performance and productivity levels. Datapac has a deep understanding of the storage needs of Irish businesses and can match these with tailored solutions which meet each customer’s specific needs.
We will ensure that storage, back-up and recovery are all working well together to ensure our customers have the best and most effective storage solutions in place.
Patrick Kickham is a director with Datapac
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers