the benefits of tiered storage

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The Benefits of Tiered Storage Organizations capture and store a great deal of information and data on a daily basis from a wide range of sources. This information is structured (databases records), semi-structured (email), and unstructured (documents and files). Because there’s so much of it, storage managers try to find ways to store it so that the most important information is readily accessible and at the same time try to keep storage costs reasonable. IDC’s The Digital Universe study projects that the total amount of data created and copied annually was 4.4 zettabytes (10 10 , or 4.4 billion 1TB disk drives) at the end of 2013 and will grow by a factor of 10 by 2020.--David Floyer, The Growth and Management of Unstructured Data This where tiered storage comes into play. SNIA (Storage Network Industry Association) defines tiered storage as, “Storage that is physically partitioned into multiple distinct classes based on price, performance, or other attributes….Data may be dynamically moved among classes within a tiered storage implementation based on access activity and other considerations.” Tiered storage sounds simple. You put different types of data and information on different storage tiers. But it’s not as simple as it may seem. There are some big decisions to make before you even define your actual storage tiers. www.everteam.com +33 (0)1 72 71 33 33 | 336, rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris – France

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Page 1: The Benefits of Tiered Storage

The Benefits of Tiered Storage

Organizations capture and store a great deal of information and data on a daily basis from a wide range of sources. This information is structured (databases records), semi-structured (email), and unstructured (documents and files). Because there’s so much of it, storage managers try to find ways to store it so that the most important information is readily accessible and at the same time try to keep storage costs reasonable.

“IDC’s The Digital Universe study projects that the total amount of data created and copied annually was 4.4 zettabytes (10 10 , or 4.4 billion 1TB disk drives) at the end of 2013 and will grow by a factor of 10 by 2020.“

--David Floyer, The Growth and Management of Unstructured Data

This where tiered storage comes into play.

SNIA (Storage Network Industry Association) defines tiered storage as, “Storage that is physically partitioned into multiple distinct classes based on price, performance, or other attributes….Data may be dynamically moved among classes within a tiered storage implementation based on access activity and other considerations.”

Tiered storage sounds simple. You put different types of data and information on different storage tiers. But it’s not as simple as it may seem. There are some big decisions to make before you even define your actual storage tiers.

www.everteam.com+33 (0)1 72 71 33 33 | 336, rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris – France

Page 2: The Benefits of Tiered Storage

Tiered Storage Starts with Data Management

Working with Storage Tiers

Not all data is considered equal. While organizations create, capture and

store gigabytes and even terabytes of data every year, they only use a small

portion of it on a day-to-day basis.

Data management is the process of understanding what data an

organization has, how often it’s used, how important it is, and how it needs

to be handled when it’s no longer useful.

SNIA defines several information classes that you can use to start to define

your data. These are:

• Mission critical

• Business vital

• Business important

• Important productive

• Not Important

• Discard

The typical approach to creating storage tiers is to create three tiers: Primary, Secondary, and

Archival.

Primary storage tiers are called Tier 1; secondary is Tier 2; and archival is Tier 3. You can, of

course, define more tiers depending on your business requirements. The most important

tier is Tier 1, and it’s where you store your most important data and data that is frequently

accessed in the running of the business.

Tier 1 storage hardware and software is high-quality media and the most expensive storage

you have. As your tiers increase, the storage costs go down. So, for example, if Tier 3 is archival

storage, you may use Tape or DVD, which is much cheaper than say a Solid State Disk (SSD)

you might use for Tier 1.

The Benefits of Tiered Storage 2

Use some or all of these classes as a starting point, or create your own. Once you have identified the importance of each type of data you use,

you’ll want to document how it’s used, as well as how often it’s accessed (frequently, periodically, occasionally, rarly, never, by request). Other

ways to define data classes include financial and compliance considerations. Often a data classification process is done by a team, not just IT.

The team may include representatives from areas such as the business, security, legal, and information management. Any department within

your organization who has some responsibility for the data should be included in classification discussions.

Defining your data classes is considered the hardest part of a tiered storage strategy. This may be partly due to trying to get the business to

discuss their data priorities with your team.

Once you have defined your data classes, you should assign each data class to a storage tier.

Page 3: The Benefits of Tiered Storage

Tiered storage helps reduce storage costs, and that’s important because IT is constantly

under pressure to keep the costs of data storage low, but at the same time, not

jeopardize the data.

Tiered storage can help achieve greater efficiency. Storing all your data on a single tier

means that every application and every user in your organization is accessing the same

storage. This can lead to performance issues for applications and slow access for users

to who need to get their data quickly.

By moving less important applications and data off to lower tiers, mission critical

applications are more efficient and perform better.

Satisfying compliance requirements is also a benefit of tiered storage. Many

organizations are required to keep information long after it’s used in the daily run of the

business. By creating archival storage, organizations can keep data for a long time, but

not have it taking up priority space or affecting performance in a mission-critical tier.

The Benefits of Tiered Storage

The Benefits of Tiered Storage 3

When you define your storage tiers, you have to think about a number of things. Hardware and software costs are key, but so is power

consumption, floor space, and installation and training.

Another key consideration is the SLAs you have with each business department, or more specifically, each application. SLAs indicate

important information that affects tiered storage such as performance, capacity, functionality, availability, backups, disaster recovery

and others.

graphic courtesy of ILM Tutorial- Tiered Storage

Page 4: The Benefits of Tiered Storage

The Benefits of Tiered Storage 4

Tiered Storage and Unstructured DataDifferent types of data create different challenges for tiered storage. There

are three types of data to deal with:

• Unstructured: documents and files

• Semi-structured: email

• Structured: records in a database

Unstructured data is the fastest growing data type for businesses today and

includes data such as video, images, files and documents, web pages, and

more. Semi-structured data is often included in the discussion of how to

deal with storing unstructured data.

Unstructured data is important to organizations because it can be analyzed

and insights gained that support data-driven decision making. But all this

data isn’t necessarily used on a day to day basis, and different portions of

unstructured data are used at different times depending on the questions

and insights business users need.

This is why tiered storage is such a great approach for handling the volumes

of unstructured data that organizations capture. Unstructured data needs to

be classified the same as all other data, but once it is, much of it can likely be

moved onto lower storage tiers, so it doesn’t interfere with mission-critical

data.

Storage managers also need to consider how they will move unstructured

data between tiers, or to a compliance archive or other storage tier, in

addition to privacy and security considerations of the data classes.

Page 5: The Benefits of Tiered Storage

The Benefits of Tiered Storage 5

Wrapping UpTiered storage is a great approach to managing the volumes of data

organizations capture every day. But it’s important to remember that

tiered storage is hardware and software, and a set of processes. The

hardest part of implementing tiered storage is classifying your data

and then assigning storage tiers.

With the incredible growth of unstructured data that organizations

want to maintain and use for analysis and insights, tiered storage is a

smart approach that keeps this data in the best locations and makes

it easier to find and use when the business needs it.

Tiered storage and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) go hand in hand. SNIA

defines ILM as, “..the policies, processes, practices and tools used to align the business

value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure from

the time information is conceived through its final disposition.”

With this definition in mind, defining storage tiers requires thinking about additional

storage attributes (some of which we’ve already mentioned) such as:

• Performance: How well the application is required to perform and how fast data is

sent to the end user.

• Scalability: How easy is it to increase or decrease the storage, can it be partitioned

and so on.

• Backup and Recovery: What are the backup and recovery requirements of the data.

• Replication: Does the data need to be replicated?

• Availability: What are the availability requirements of the data (24/7?)

• Operation/Management

Information Lifecycle

Management is Key

Page 6: The Benefits of Tiered Storage

[email protected]

About Everteam

Everteam brings over 25 years’ experience and innovation to the field of Enterprise Content

Management. In an ever-increasing legal and compliance environment, Everteam’s range

of products support the improvement of content –driven processes, and enable enterprise

customers to easily monitor and align their content strategies for overall organizational

efficiency and effectiveness.

+33 (0)1 72 71 33 3

336, rue Saint-Honoré,

75001 Paris – France

+1 (650) 596-1800 (voice) / +1 (650) 249-0439 (fax)

28 State Street Boston,

MA 02109, United States