Survey Says: Mixed-disk tiers not for everyone

Do you plan to implement different tiers in the same frame?

Not all storage pros have bought into the tiered storage hype. According to a recent study, approximately half of the Fortune 1000 storage professionals surveyed have reservations about mixing disk tiers in existing arrays. High-end Fibre Channel SAN frames are too expensive to justify populating with low-cost disk, they say.

"That's expensive real estate in Tier-1 Fibre Channel--the slots have a cost associated with them and I'd rather not mix low-cost Serial ATA in there," says one survey taker. A small majority, however, have no compunction about tiered storage. As one survey taker put it, "We do not see value in empty air in a frame, so why not mix?"

Source: TheInfoPro (www.theinfopro.net) Storage Study, Wave 5