by Bruce Kornfeld, Lead, Dell Storage Alliances — February 22, 2010
Last week NetApp’s Tom Georgens said the concept of automated tiered storage is “dying” and his comments were reported on The Register and Storage Soup from SearchStorage.
The only thing that's dying in storage is static data and the belief that the same old storage systems are intelligent enough to sort and store ever-increasing amounts of data in a budget-constrained world. Any vendor who believes that automated data movement is not the future of storage either misunderstands where the industry is headed, or simply can’t offer this feature in their portfolio. For some vendors, automated tiered storage is hard to deliver but most acknowledge that it is becoming a core requirement – just look at EMC’s recent intentions with FAST.
Typically, entire volumes of data need to be moved, which is time consuming and could cause application interruptions or slow-downs. When automated tiered storage is done inside the volume at the block level, there is no disruption to applications and admins don't even have to think about it. The fact is, if data isn’t being actively used or accessed by applications, why would anyone keep it on expensive storage if they don’t have to?
We believe this is a waste of scarce resources that could be better used. Furthermore, solving customers performance needs with very expensive cache is a throwback to the way things were done in the '80s and '90s and is a never-ending proposition for users—once you start you just can't stop. IT departments can't afford to manage data that way anymore.
Compellent’s Fluid Data storage enables automated tiering at a granular level between any drive technology, speed and even RAID level and we’ve been delivering this capability for over 5 years. We move all the inactive blocks of data to the lowest cost tier possible and free up the performance tiers to handle the active data. Shifting data between SSD, FC, SATA, and SAS works quietly and unobtrusively in the background. Our customers love our “set it and forget it approach” and 80 percent of their upgrade orders are for the slowest spinning, low-cost SATA or SAS drives. That’s why automated tiering has proven popular – because it saves customers a lot on disk drives, space and power costs. The fact that most large, legacy storage vendors are now introducing their own solutions only validate that customers are asking for automated tiered storage. Automatic tiering is one party no storage vendor can afford to miss.