Any IT decision maker working in infrastructure resource management (IRM) knows that not all data are equal. High-end storage is expensive, and it’s impractical to use top-shelf servers for all of your company’s files and software. IT managers invest time and effort into tiered storage as a way to optimize their storage infrastructure.

Effective tiering involves allocating each application and its associated content to an appropriate tier in a storage hierarchy. For example, tier 1 data may include critical files or programs that will be retained in RAID-protected, high-I/O, top-of-line storage. Data that is less important and less frequently accessed may be placed on slower, inexpensive servers.  

Skillfully managing tiered storage is crucial to optimizing your company’s storage space as well as reducing costs. It also poses many challenges because storage needs are constantly evolving: the value of data changes; the amount of data grows; and companies continuously strive to comply with new legal and regulatory requirements for storage.

During a data migration, optimization, or consolidation initiative, you will most likely have to re-tier your storage. To successfully re-tier your infrastructure, you need to capture various data points and then correlate these data sets in order to generate an optimized scenario. Once you create this roadmap for optimized re-tiering, the next challenge is efficiently executing the task. Typically, the IT staff would use various strategies and tools—all of which rely on error-prone methods that are risky, expensive, time consuming, and manually intensive. Many IT managers find that the risk outweighs the benefits, which is why so many businesses continue to run their storage infrastructures at sub-par levels.

SANpulse provides a simple, efficient re-tiering solution.

SANpulse software customizes internal work breakdown structures, allowing a re-tiering solution that accounts for all customer requirements and dependencies. By capturing the required data points and incorporating them into customer-tailored algorithms, SANlogics generates an output that precisely identifies re-tiering opportunities and provides detailed schematics regarding execution.