A year ago, less than half of the Storage readers we surveyed had a storage tiering process in place, but nearly 60% of those who weren't tiering said they planned to do so. Apparently, a lot of them carried through on their plans, as our most recent survey shows 59% now use tiered storage.
By Rich Castagna
Storage tiering -- putting data in its proper place -- can be a huge money saver for a storage shop by getting less-frequently accessed data off expensive primary systems and onto cheaper disks. A year ago, less than half of the Storage readers surveyed had a tiering process in place, but nearly 60% of those who weren't tiering said they planned to do so. Apparently, a lot of them carried through on their plans, as our most recent survey shows 59% now use tiered storage. In addition, half of those not yet sold on tiering said they'll take the plunge (approximately 61% will do so over the next 12 months). Those implementing storage tiers tend to keep their schemes simple: 75% limit the number of tiers they support to two or three, while 76% keep half of their data or less on primary storage. The biggest pain point related to tiering remains classifying data so it can be properly placed. Forty-two percent of respondents said it's the biggest hitch in the process vs. 41% last year.
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"Successful tiered storage will be predicated on automation and granularity. Manually moving LUNs around the farm is a no-win situation." -- Survey respondent
BIO: Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the Storage Media Group.
