Automated Storage Tiering – White Paper

INTRODUCTION

The modern challenge of matching the demand for smooth and high application performance with the capabilities of an available storage system is a struggle — and it’s real. System administrators and other IT professionals dealing with IT infrastructure compilation would most likely turn to flash as the solution. However, once you’ve bought that flash, you’ll face the issue of implementing it properly.

PROBLEM

Modern businesses not only need more storage — they require it to be faster. With this in mind, tiered storage and all-flash systems may be considered to approach the storage performance dilemma. In combining both of them, organizations can build mixed flash-tiered setups: the faster tier would consist of Enterprise-grade flash (NVMe, Intel Optane, etc.) and the cold one of slower flash (QLC SSDs). That being said, having deployed this scenario, the IT staff is bound to face new challenges in the data management realm. IT administrators will face the decision of having the data set either in the hot tier or the cold one, which increased the time allocated to manual data management and total cost of ownership (TCO). Buying an all-flash array won’t avoid that problem.

IT specialists will need to invest themselves in choosing specific storage types for specific tasks as well as tier and interconnect that storage properly for a most favorable output.

Typical tiered storage manual data management routine

SOLUTION

StarWind Automated Storage Tiering liberates IT administrators from the usual burdensome and inefficient storage management routine. Automated tiering from StarWind enables the IT staff to provision storage with the necessary performance characteristics in a matter of a few clicks. Thanks to the data flow being entirely automated, the TCO is visibly decreased. All flash, fast and slow, is united into a single pool, which not only offers the best performance but also extends the life of your flash. This StarWind feature allows for proper system planning and smart storage provisioning, elevating the performance of your applications as if served by an Enterprise-grade all-flash storage array without actually buying one. Subsequently, costs are minimized and return on investment (ROI) increased.

Our Storage QoS policies ensure that even the most IOPS-demanding applications are always powered up without slowing down the system. Invest in storage solutions instead of piling up physical hardware.

Data management process with StarWind Automated Storage Tiering

СONCLUSION