In today’s challenging business environment, storage administrators are often asked to do more with less. Getting maximum return on a storage investment is key, especially if you are using high-performance flash drives. But, in a typical IT environment, most of the I/O operations are performed on a small subset of the stored data. The challenge lies in matching this high-demand data with high-performing drives.The Easy Tier(R) function, included in the Lenovo Storage family, meets this challenge by automatically and dynamically migrating I/O hotspots to high-performing drives.In the next five minutes, you will learn how Easy Tier can improve storage efficiency for your business.
With integrated Easy Tier technology, the system automatically identifies and migrates highly active data without disruption to drives. In a Lenovo Storage system, a storage pool can contain managed disks from three different tiers that include flash, enterprise, and nearline drives. The flash tier exists when flash MDisks are in the pool. The flash MDisks provide greater performance than enterprise or nearline MDisks. The enterprise tier exists when enterprise-class MDisks are in the pool, such as those built from Serial Attached SCSI drives, known as SAS drives. The nearline tier exists when nearline-class MDisks are used in the pool, such as those built from nearline SAS drives. All MDisks belong to one of the tiers, including MDisks that are not yet a part of a pool. In this environment, Easy Tier continuously monitors workload, identifies hotspots by measuring and analyzing statistics on performance and activity, and then places the hot data on flash drives, all without I/O interruption. Data will be monitored and dynamically placed in the most cost effective tier. The end result is greater storage efficiency. Easy Tier removes the need for storage administrators to spend hours manually performing this analysis and migration, eliminates unnecessary investments in high-performance storage, and improves your bottom line.
In addition to hotspot management across tiers, Easy Tier also provides auto-rebalance capability, Auto-rebalancing improves system performance by automatically balancing the workload among the arrays of a tier within a hybrid or managed storage pool, based on data usage. Easy Tier customer control at the pool and volume levels provides a more granular and flexible control of data, as well as providing volume-level tier restriction where a volume can be excluded from the nearline tier.
Let’s look at a quick example of how Easy Tier might benefit your business. An administrator has purchased flash drives to gain better performance for an IT environment. The administrator is using a Lenovo Storage system to manage multiple host volumes. Each volume is comprised of extents that are striped across multiple managed disks, from hard-disk drive arrays located in a storage pool. As applications perform I/O to these volumes, some extents are more frequently accessed, making them potential hotspots. Easy Tier measures and analyzes the activity in this pool, and then automatically begins optimizing the host volumes by migrating hot data to flash drives and cold data to enterprise or nearline drives.
As you can see, the dynamic migration of high-demand data to high-performance drives provides many benefits, including maximum storage efficiency and affordable performance optimization for disk environments. In fact, Easy Tier can provide up to three times the throughput with just 10 to 15 percent of your data on flash drives.
Today, you learned about how Easy Tier provides storage efficiency with real value for businesses, administrators, and the storage environments they manage. Now it’s time to ask yourself, how efficient is your storage? To learn more, visit ibm.com and additional topics in IBM Knowledge Center.