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Interface considerations for tiered storage.

Article Excerpt
Never before has the enterprise enjoyed such a comprehensive range of storage solutions from which to choose. The Fibre Channel, Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI interfaces all play vital roles in tiered storage infrastructures, and often the perception of these roles can overlap. Striking the optimal balance of interfaces in tiered storage solutions is key to achieving maximum performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness.

Tiered Storage Fundamentals

The traditional storage model acknowledges only two types of data storage: online and offline. Online requires high-availability, and is usually for transactional data that demands the performance and reliability of enterprise-class disc drives; offline refers to archival data that is infrequently accessed and stored in libraries of high-capacity tapes.

But what about the vast quantity of data that falls between these two categories? The following applications all involve data that is not necessarily highly-available or mission-critical storage, but which must still be readily accessible to multiple users:

* File serving

* Fixed-content data

* Disc-to-disc backup

* Bulk storage

* Short-term archiving

In addition, regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requires rapid retrieval of enormous quantities of financial and medical data. An Enterprise Strategy Group study concluded that such "in-between" information will soon comprise the majority of enterprise data.

The previous options for this plethora of data--online storage (optimized for performance, not capacity) with its relatively high cost-per-Gbyte; or offline storage (optimized...