Modern storages have a flexible tiered storage architecture, in which customizable policies ensure that data requiring high performance is indeed placed in the most efficient and appropriate storage medium. In this way, the storage system can segment disk pools more intelligently, thus providing the necessary flexibility for today’s computing environments.
Storages with this feature automatically and seamlessly move frequently accessed data from standard disks to high-performance disks, placing this data in a more optimized storage tier to handle application requests more quickly.
This flexible tiered storage architecture eliminates the need for human intervention, as all data movements are automated, thus avoiding potential errors and instabilities. This type of technology allows interventions regardless of the storage tier to which the data belongs.
There are three dedicated tiers for data segmentation: Flash \[SSDs]; Enterprise \[SAS | 10K and 15K]; Nearline \[SATA | 7.2K].
- Flash Tier – The flash tier provides higher performance than the enterprise and/or nearline tiers. This tier is recommended for situations that require high performance, as SSDs are typically at least 22 times faster than enterprise tier disks.
- Enterprise Tier – The enterprise tier is an intermediate performance level, as it uses 10K and 15K HDDs, which are at least three times more performant compared to the nearline tier.
- Nearline Tier – The nearline tier is designed to store data with low access frequency, which does not require high performance, as the seek time is much higher compared to the flash and enterprise tiers.
