31 July 2010
Saturday
DSI develops ILM in an object-based tiered storage platform
By Victor Ng | Apr 20, 2009
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PrintThese days, storage systems with either a storage area network (SAN) or a network-attached storage (NAS) setup used in a typical data center or enterprise have to satisfy two major requirements: to meet the capacity needs of an ever-growing volume of data, while intelligently managing the huge volume of data.
Tiered storage environments were introduced to meet these requirements as well as reduce storage costs.
However, researchers from the Data Storage Institute (DSI) intend to push the limits of tiered storage platforms further by combining the high performance characteristics of object-based systems with Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). The ILM platform being developed uses a novel object information valuation technique to evaluate the frequency of usage of an object.
Based on this valuation model, the system then determines what tier to place the object in. With this ILM feature, the DSI system can intelligently manage the data and bring about disk savings of around 40 – 60%.
Tiered storage
The capacity need in an enterprise data center includes not only storage space but also the Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for different types of data. Management of data involves copying/ replication, migration and archiving.
Tiered storage environments were introduced in order to satisfy capacity needs and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In a tiered storage environment, business critical data is kept in high-end (Tier 1) or more expensive storage while less critical data is kept in lower tiers which have lower costs.
The placement of data is also matched with the Service Level Agreements (SLA) of the application and the storage device type, such as Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA).
Hierarchical storage management
Management of data and storage in a tiered storage platform is called Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM). There are several HSM storage products currently in the market from major vendors. In addition to these, new generations of object-based storage products like Lustre and Panasas are commercially available and provide high parallel I/O performance and scalability required for a data center.
However, a drawback of these products is that they do not support tiered storage. Combining the highly scalable and high performance characteristics of these systems with a tiered storage platform would be an ideal solution for enterprise data centers to handle the huge volume of data and at the same time keep the TCO low.
