Faeandar
Guest
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 Posted:
Wed Jul 13, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject:
Re: SAN Storage (Tier)? |
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On 12 Jul 2005 22:08:54 -0700, shpot4@yahoo.com wrote:
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Can someone please explain to me the difference between Tier 1 and Tier
2 storage?
Cheers!
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Hah, now that's posted by either a troll or a newbie since it could
easily start a flame war.
Best explanation *I* have is (for the general public) cost. Tier 1 is
usually considered the high end stuff. Fiber channel drives,
redundant everything, fast, expensive (usually), and reserved for
mission critical applications and data.
Tier 2 is usually (s)ata. High capacity, still redundant but maybe
not everywhere. Used generally for less important apps/data and
possibly disk based backups.
Example of vendor tier:
Hitachi (HDS) 9980 - tier1
HDS 9500 - tier2
The 9980 is discontinued these days but the point is still the same.
The definition of tiers is becoming more environment specific all the
time. In my case tiers are based purely on performance, not on cost.
Tier2 is actually more expensive than tier1. How's that?! Doesn't
that go against conventional wisdom? No.
Tier1 is defined as the fastest storage IO we can get, which in
reality is pretty cheap if you're not worried about availability.
Tier2 is not so fast but is more redundant, that's where the cost
usually comes into play.
Anyway, hopefully this helps. I imagine there will be plenty of posts
on this one...
~F |
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ceradsky@gmail.com
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Jul 14, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject:
Re: SAN Storage (Tier)? |
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I would agree. Tiered storage is the concept of logically grouping your
storage in ways that make it easier to place data on the storage that
you operate that most closely matches your price/performance profile
that you define. One person's tier 1 may be RAID-10 ATA and tier 2 is
RAID -5 ATA, etc. The usual concept is tier 1 - high speed I/O, tier 2
- general purpose computing, tier 3 - archival, tier 4 - long term
archive/off-site (we usually integrate tape into this tier ourselves).
The real key to enabling tiered storage is automating the information
flow from one tier to another based on business rules. Mainframes have
used ILM concepts for years, so it is no surprise that open systems
storage is finding great value in the concept.
Don't let any vendors lead you into thinking that tiered storage is
their original idea or that they are the only ones who do it. Do the
research and understand that proprietary software stacks that only let
you work with their hardware can hurt you in the long run. |
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