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Access "Automated tiering awaits standards"

Published: 20 Oct 2012
Top 15 Storage hardware and software Products of the Year 2006

This article is part of the Vol. 5 No. 12 February 2007 issue of Top 15 Storage hardware and software Products of the Year 2006

One of the great, and as yet unfulfilled, storage needs is automatically moving data to different tiers of storage between different vendor products. How close is the industry to achieving this goal? "I don't think I'm supposed to talk about SMI-S [Storage Management Initiative Specification] release dates, so I'll just say that it's being worked on," says Edgar St. Pierre, co-chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) ILM Technical Workgroup. Other knowledgeable industry observers say the necessary additions to SMI-S to enable automated data tiering will probably be released in one to two years, and products based on those standards will follow soon after. SNIA is working to define three areas as standards: data classification service (to identify the data's requirements for service), data service-level management (to map data requirements to the capabilities of the different storage tiers) and data lifecycle management (because storage requirements for data may change over time as the data's value changes). Value, of course, is a fuzzy, ... Access >>>

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