Key Points:
- Data driven, real-time responsiveness
- Optimized for low cost and maximum efficiency
- Operational simplicity
Our NetApp Virtual Storage Tier allows you to scale performance and capacity while achieving the highest level of storage efficiency in the industry. The result is maximum flexibility for your data center infrastructure.
The Challenge
The momentum in shared IT infrastructure and the need for always-on application availability has motivated a rethinking of traditional storage tiering models. The proliferation of storage media technologies (SATA, Fibre Channel, SAS, Flash) can complicate decisions of how to get the right data to the right place at the right time. While the need still exists to match specific data with the technology that can best align with life cycle and performance objectives, there is also a mandatory requirement to reduce complexity and cost.
Enterprises are looking for ways to automate the storage tiering process to achieve a more dynamic and cost effective infrastructure. Specific goals include the need to:
- Scale application performance on demand
- Reduce storage acquisition costs
- Simplify the procurement process
- Maximize data center efficiency
- Reduce operational complexity
The NetApp Virtual Storage Tier
The NetApp Virtual Storage Tier offers a unique approach to automated storage tiering. Enabled by our foundational strengths in storage efficiency and intelligent caching, the Virtual Storage Tier provides:
- Real-Time, data driven response to your most demanding application workloads
- The ability to consolidate all of your data onto two storage tiers
- Industry leading efficiency through integration of data deduplication and thin provisioning
- Out of the box operation-set it and forget it
The NetApp Virtual Storage Tier is a self managing, data driven service layer for storage infrastructure. It provides real-time assessment of workload based priorities and ensures that I/O data requests are optimized for cost and performance without the requirement for complex data classification. Default data placement is to the lowest cost physical storage available (usually high capacity SATA) since the use of intelligent caching is used to leverage Flash based technology without the need for actual data movement across different types of physical media. Data promotion is done on demand based on actual usage patterns thus ensuring immediate response to changing workload demands. Additionally, The Virtual Storage Tier is fully integrated into NetApp’s Unified Storage Architecture thus ensuring full compatibility with both SAN and NAS environments and related data protection and business continuity requirements.
To learn how the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier enables you to build a flexible and efficient shared infrastructure, learn more here.
