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Infortrend announces avialability of automated storage tiering on the Mid-Range ESVA Solution
November 2011 by Marc Jacob
Infortrend announced the availability of automated storage tiering on its mid-range ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualised Architecture) storage family. Automated storage tiering optimises storage performance, enhances data distribution within storage pools, and increases ROI.
In today’s storage market, a wide variety of storage media is available to enterprises to meet different service level requirements in their datacentres. Traditionally, however, fine-tuning service levels has required significant cost and effort, making it difficult to properly utilise available resources.
Now, automated storage tiering on Infortrend’s ESVA family of storage solutions provides an architecture that fully leverages the advantages of different storage media, including SSDs for high-performance data storage, by enabling users to flexibly assign applications to four available tiers distinguished by different drive types and RAID levels.
As part of ESVA’s automated storage tiering, data is migrated between tiers based on data usage patterns and user-configured policies. With tiering implemented on the sub-volume level, data can be moved in a highly granular fashion. Data migration achieves efficient distribution of data, and ensures that SSDs and other high-performance drives have the necessary storage space to deal with mission-critical applications.
The performance and data distribution efficiency achieved with automated storage tiering can help users significantly increase ROI. When compared to a traditional ESVA configuration consisting of one RAID array and one expansion enclosure equipped with 600GB SAS drives, an ESVA configuration with automated storage tiering that consists of only one RAID array equipped with four 100GB SSDs and twelve 2TB nearline drives can offer a performance increase of 25% to 50% and a capacity increase of 5TB, while reducing costs by more than 15%.
For users requiring maximised performance, an ESVA configuration with automated storage tiering that consists of one RAID array equipped with eight 100GB SSDs and eight 2TB nearline drives can offer a performance increase of up to 150% at the same storage capacity and cost when compared to a traditional ESVA configuration consisting of one RAID array and one expansion enclosure without automated storage tiering.
More efficient storage utilisation also reduces the storage footprint and lowers power consumption. Power consumption is further reduced by the use of SSDs, as these drives consume relatively limited amounts of power.
Automated storage tiering is now available on the following models: ESVA F70-2830, ESVA F60-2830, ESVA E60-2230, and ESVA E60-2130.
