System administrators and IT proffessionals face the challenge of matching the application performance demand with storage systems capabilities more and more often. Flash becomes the first choice to solve the problem. However, there is still the question on how to implement it properly.
With the business growth, applications don’t just need more storage, they need it to be faster. There are a couple of ways to increase storage performance: tiered storage and all-flash systems. In tiered systems, data management can become a critical issue for the IT staff. IT administrators should decide whether the data set should be in a hot tier or in a cold one, increasing the time spent on manual data management and the total cost of ownership (TCO). At the same time, implementing an all-flash storage is often an overkill and decreases the return on investment (ROI) signinficantly. Researches show that almost 60% of data is mostly idle and does not require high-perfomance storage
Manual data management on a tiered storage
Solution
With the implementation of StarWind Automated Storage Tiering, the IT staff is“set free” from the storage management routine. A system with automated tiering allows administrators to easily provision storage with the desired performance characteristics. The data flow between tiers is fully automated, thereby shrinking the TCO. A properly planned system with Automated Storage powered by StarWind will give the applications the performance of an all-flash array, minimizing funds invested and increasing the ROI. So, there is no more need to buy big and expensive flash arrays. Storage QoS policies make sure that IOPS-hungry applications have their data on flash all the time.
Data management with StarWind Automated Storage Tiering
Conclusion
By adding StarWind Automated Storage Tiering to the storage environment, organizations benefit from the fast-performing storage and increased ROI. The TCO is also much lower as management routines get automated and do not require manual labor anymore.
