The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Data Tiers: Cost-Efficient Storage of Data
All data is not equal. The importance of financial data often trumps the importance of other types of data. Further, as data ages, it’s value often degrades as well.
Data tiering is a way to categorize and assign a priority to data and to then store the data on media appropriate for that category of data. For example, flash or other high-performance storage might be very fast but it also comes at a premium price while tape storage is very slow but relatively cheap to use. Data tiering balances performance, capacity and cost characteristics.
Data tier levels are often referred to by temperature: cold, warm, hot, and mission critical (or tier zero). Hot storage corresponds to the fastest type of storage. Warm data is ‘nearline’ speed. And, cold data storage often is slow and refers to storage media like tape. Data often flows through a life cycle of high immediate importance to lesser importance, and as the importance of the data wanes, the data tier where it should be stored also likely changes.
Steve Kearns, vice president at Elastic, said that “as data expands exponentially over time, the cost of storing that data grows to the point where customers are forced to choose between deleting their data or managing increased costs.”
John Toigo, CEO at Toigo Partners International, wrote for TechTarget SearchStorage that “some vendors are keen to promote tier-zero storage, which are arrays comprising all-flash, memory-based solid-state drives (SSDs). Tier-zero arrays are seen as an initial write target for I/O-intensive apps, used to boost I/O performance, especially behind virtual server workloads.”
The greatest benefit of data tiering is the CAPEX savings that occurs by reducing the need for purchases of high-end and expensive storage products. But in addition to that, often alongside data tiering, methods like data compression and deduplication are implemented which further reduce the volume size of the stored data, further reducing costs. Finally, offloading infrequently used data to lower data tiers can reduces the load on top-tier storage and can result in a performance boost for end users.
