Comments on: No More Tiers / Tears http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/no-more-tiers-tears/ Turning Storage Technology into IT Gold Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:44:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: drakpzone http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/no-more-tiers-tears/comment-page-1/#comment-48 drakpzone Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:48:38 +0000 http://www.backupandbeyond.com/?p=322#comment-48 Really interesting post. Anyway, since one of the driving factors when defining a storage tier is indeed cost, there is the chance of considering deduplication (as long as it is sold as an addon/paid feature) as a tiering factor. What if you have some amount of data that can't leverage deduplication due to its nature (e.g. higly non redundant compressed data, w/ low commonalities ratios)? Using a (paid) deduped storage could cost more than a non deduped storage, thus leading to 'less than optimal placement'. I've been thinking a lot about tiering lately (for my company), and the hardest part when defining our tiering policy is to match each stakeholder's expecations: management wants to optimize placement based on cost, IT wants to optimize on performance, security wants to optimize on protection/availability. I don't think there's a perfect recipe, so I take tiering as a 'what fits best' solution. Thus, while I agree with your statements in general, I'll allow for some exceptions to the general rule: dedup can be a tiering factor, sometimes :-) Really interesting post. Anyway, since one of the driving factors when
defining a storage tier is indeed cost, there is the chance of considering
deduplication (as long as it is sold as an addon/paid feature) as a tiering
factor. What if you have some amount of data that can’t leverage deduplication
due to its nature (e.g. higly non redundant compressed data, w/ low commonalities ratios)?
Using a (paid) deduped storage could cost more than a non deduped storage,
thus leading to ‘less than optimal placement’.

I’ve been thinking a lot about tiering lately (for my company), and the
hardest part when defining our tiering policy is to match each stakeholder’s
expecations: management wants to optimize placement based on cost,
IT wants to optimize on performance, security wants to optimize on protection/availability.
I don’t think there’s a perfect recipe, so I take tiering as a ‘what fits best’
solution. Thus, while I agree with your statements in general, I’ll allow
for some exceptions to the general rule: dedup can be a tiering factor, sometimes :-)

]]> By: Jerry Thornton http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/no-more-tiers-tears/comment-page-1/#comment-47 Jerry Thornton Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:42:14 +0000 http://www.backupandbeyond.com/?p=322#comment-47 I couldn't agree more with your definition of "Tier". The hardest thing to get my storage team customers to do is to break that "drive speed and size equals tier" mindset. I couldn’t agree more with your definition of “Tier”. The hardest thing to get my storage team customers to do is to break that “drive speed and size equals tier” mindset.

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