Tiered Storage Solutions for Fibre Channel Storage Systems By Bob Brencic, Emulex Embedded Storage Products

Not all corporate data is created – or stays – equal. The records of today's receipts from a point of sale system may be vitally important for the next few days; be accessed again in two weeks for an analysis of sales trends and, then, never be needed again. Similarly, an archive of emails about the quarterly financial close may not be looked at for years – but then, instantly, becomes critical to defend the company against a shareholder lawsuit.

The fact that the value of data changes over time is behind the trend toward tiered storage — storing unique types of data on different storage devices based on the data's value at that moment. By storing only the most business-critical and frequently-accessed data on fast, reliable high-end Fibre Channel (FC) disk drives within storage arrays, and placing other non-critical or infrequently accessed data on cost-effective Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drives inside the same storage arrays, organizations make the most efficient use of storage budgets while ensuring rapid access to any type of information.

Many may be led to believe that a tiered storage solution is only provided by emerging Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology, which is now making its way into the low-end storage market (Bands 1-3). High-end and midrange FC storage systems, however, have been shipping integrated tiered storage solutions of high performance FC disk drives with cost-effective SATA disk drives for a few years now and are shipping millions of SATA disk drives in FC storage systems each quarter.