Tiered storage architecture demystified Understand tiered ... · The second level of storage is for data that still needs to be readily available but where you can trade off a little

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1 Understand tiered storage architecture and why your business needs it Version 1.0 © CINTRA 2016www.cintra.com

Information Lifecycle Managment Supercharge your business by taking control of

your information management

Abdul Sheikh, Chief Technology Officer, Cintra Corporation

Co-founder and CTO of multi-award winning Cintra Corporation – a global Oracle Platinum partner and Enterprise Architecture specialist operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Tiered storage architecture demystified

Understand tiered storage architecture and why your business needs it

Enjoying the benefits of ILM with tiered storage architecture

At home, we store things based on how often we use them: cutlery and crockery we need every day goes in the prime kitchen cupboards where they’re easily got at. The vacuum cleaner, which we may use once a week, goes in the under-stairs cupboard – not prime storage space but still easily accessible. Big suitcases, which we use a couple of times a year, go in the attic, where getting them out involves a bit more effort and time.

The data in your business should be treated in exactly the same way. There’s little point in keeping information you rarely need on expensive, high-performance flash storage. However, if your only other option is to archive onto tape, access is too cumbersome. This is why a multi-tiered storage architecture is so valuable, because it gives you a greater number of options, enabling you to select the most appropriate, based on cost and performance requirements.




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Tiered storage architecture demystified (continued)Broadly speaking, enterprise data storage architecture can be divided into four tiers:

Your prime real estateThe top tier of storage is where you keep your critical, active data that involves lots of write operations. This information needs to be instantly available, so high performance and low latency are essential. Your flash-based storage area network (SAN) would sit in this category and could be complemented by in-memory technology.

Less cost, more capacityThe second level of storage is for data that still needs to be readily available but where you can trade off a little performance for much lower costs. As a result, you get access to affordable, high-capacity storage. Tier two, which typically takes the form of network-attached storage (NAS), has a range of use cases, each of which enables you to implement varying degrees of compression. This is where you’d store the less active data in your database infrastructure, for reporting, data warehousing and decision-support systems. It can also be home to your non-production environments, such as test and development, or even certain backups.

Big DataWhile your frequently used reporting data should reside on tier-two storage, you’re likely to have ad hoc requirements to seek insights from your wider dataset, including unstructured data. You may not want to ask these questions very often, or you may not know how useful the answers will be, so you need a low-cost platform that keeps large volumes and varieties of historical data available in a way you can analyze when required. Currently, tier three is likely to be distributed, Big Data storage. However, emerging solutions are bringing down the cost of storing and analyzing Big Data at tier two level. This trend could eventually elevate this type of information onto your tier two storage platform, rather than requiring its own, dedicated tier.

ArchivesSome data has to be kept, even though you’re rarely going to access it. Performance and even availability aren’t important, so you can minimize the cost of keeping this data by using archive storage, such as tape or archive cloud, with full compression. If you’re happy storing your data beyond the boundaries of your organization, cloud typically offers lower administrative overheads, faster restores and greater reliability than tape.

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Multitiered storage architecture is so valuable,

because it gives you a greater number of options, enabling

you to select the most appropriate, based on cost and

performance requirements

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Tiered storage architecture demystified (continued)

Moreover, if you use any Oracle databases or applications, these can be configured to work with Oracle Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances to deliver even greater benefits

Active management

Like with all ILM activities, tiered storage architecture needs to be actively managed. This will help maintain the benefits it can deliver. We’ll come to these shortly.

While the management activity needs to be overseen by people, much can be automated, including the movement of data between storage tiers at appropriate times. You should set up business-driven rules that control this and review them periodically to ensure they’re optimized to meet your requirements.

The advantages of tiering

By continually distributing your data across a range of storage hardware as part of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) plan, you’ll be able to create a sustainable and high-performing architecture that truly supports – rather than hampers – your business. Here are some of the key benefits of tiering:

Keep cost under control

Continually adding storage to your tier one hardware is expensive and will become unsustainable in the data deluge being brought on by the Internet of Things. By systematically moving lower-priority data onto appropriate cheaper, lower-tier storage, you’ll vastly slow the need to expand your expensive prime real estate, resulting in a more sustainable cost model.

Better customer experiences

By moving old data out of your tier-one database onto other storage, you’ll maintain or even enhance performance of your critical applications and services. As a result, you’ll be able to offer consistently high-quality experiences to your customers and staff.

Similarly, you can improve the experience for those in your business who occasionally need to access older data by keeping this on more available archive storage rather than offline tape.

Greater agility

When set up and maintained in the right way, tiered storage architecture can help you get new products and services to market more quickly. A leaner production database makes creating development environments faster, while having access to large amounts of lower-tier storage enables you to set up multiple development and test environments without having to justify the use of tier one capacity.

More efficient business users

ILM and tiered storage architecture together put more power in the hands of your business users. Instead of the IT department dictating what data gets archived (without necessarily understanding how that data is used), the business users can identify what is most

important to their activities and categorize it. This will ensure it automatically resides on the correct level of storage to enable them to do their jobs as efficiently as possible.

As a consequence, if any of your teams has service level agreements (SLAs) to meet, well-managed tiered storage architecture can make it easier for them to achieve these.

Magnifying these benefits

Provided you design and deliver your tiered data storage architecture as part of a wider ILM strategy, it can make a real difference to your business on so many levels.

Moreover, if you use any Oracle databases or applications, these can be configured to work with Oracle Engineered Systems and Storage Appliances to deliver even greater benefits. In our final article, we’ll look specifically at Oracle’s storage and explain how it can help you get more value from your existing Oracle investments.

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© CINTRA 2015 www.cintra.com4

Your pathway to successCintra is a multi-award winning Global Oracle Platinum partner and Enterprise Architecture specialist operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Cintra focuses on enterprises undergoing digital transformation strategies in Retail, Financial Services, Gaming and other verticals; becoming a trusted partner for organizations investing in Oracle Business Technology – delivering value by helping architect the digital enterprise.

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Further reading:

Best Practice Guide: Supercharge your business by taking control of your information management

Point of View: Why your business is (probably) drowning in a data deluge

Point of View: Information Lifecycle Management: Harness the power of your data

Point of View: Oracle-on-Oracle: how you can benefit



your information managementBest Practice Guide

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Tiered storage architecture demystified Understand tiered ... · The second level of storage is for data that still needs to be readily available but where you can trade off a little