Storage Virtualization Tour: All About Automated Tiering

In prior entries we have discussed some of the basic capabilities of storage virtualization; thin provisioning and the ability to use dissimilar storage hardware in some cases. A newer feature is the ability to leverage a virtualized storage system’s granular understanding of block of data to automatically move data segments to faster or slower storage tiers, based on access patterns. This capability is known as automated storage tiering.

Automated storage tiering is particularly attractive as customers consider the use of solid state disk (SSD). SSD is known for its performance, but it is also known for its premium price. Customers need to balance the performance of SSD with its cost. The good news is that for most environments, at any given moment, less than 10% of the data is currently active or is going to be active.

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