So what is auto-tiering, you may ask?
Auto-tiering, especially for storage, allows you to store (and subsequently read) your data on online storage with best fit. This happens fully automatic, based on predefined rules – but, is it really as easy as this?
To answer in short form, yes.
In most data centers today, you have different classes of online media, e.g. SATA disks, SAS disks and SSDs/Flash. Each class can have many different subcategories by its own, especially SSDs/Flash. They all differ in terms of access speed, capacity and price. Typically, you want your most frequently accessed data to stay on the fastest storage media. Unfortunately, the fastest media are the rarest media, because they are the most expensive.
Auto-Tiering and DataCore’s 12/88 Finding
This is exactly where Auto-Tiering comes into play – it can find which data-sets are most accessed by your applications and can place or relocates it to the fastest storage, in real-time, which is often called the ‘hot data’.
The same happens with warm data, it moves to second-tier storage; and cold data moves to lower-tier storage. All of that happens fully dynamic, in real-time, all the time and invisible in the background. Depending on your data usage, the classification may rank up or down automatically. This allows you to have the best speed for your business relevant information without having the entire business data blocking the most expensive online storage entirely.
Now let us have a look at DataCore Customer Support’s 12/88 finding. These two numbers describe the average percentage of hot data compared to warm and cold data. Measured in hundreds of real customer installations, our findings show that on average only 12% of the data from a typical customer is true hot data. The remaining 88%, again on average is from less frequently accessed data, which is not as critical at that point in time for your business operations.
Why You Should Care
So, what does this mean to you?
In short, when you use reliable Auto-Tiering and size SSDs/Flash to cover just 15% of your entire storage capacity, you could expect maximum application speed for 100% of your business.
Too good to be true? No, it is not.
The more you are capable to distinguish between storage classes, let’s say up to 15, the more you can tailor your storage infrastructure to your business needs.
Now, would you like to learn more or see this live? Just schedule a brief live demo with one of DataCore’s solution architects today!
