Three Tips for SMBs to Follow to Ensure a Successful Storage Tiering Implementation

Storage tiering as a strategy is gaining a lot of momentum as a way to optimize available storage capacity and bring storage costs under control.  But many small and midsized businesses (SMBs) still question if storage tiering is right for them and, if so, what steps they should take to implement it. To answer these concerns, there are three tips for SMBs to follow to ensure implementing storage tiering is the right choice for them and that they do it correctly.

The decision for some organizations as to whether or not to implement storage tiering is sometimes pretty clear cut. If an organization only has a couple of terabytes of data under management, implementing storage tiering is probably not a necessity. Conversely enterprise that have hundreds of terabytes under management will probably see substantial cost savings by implementing a tiered storage strategy.

However SMBs are often caught in the middle. They have more than a couple of terabytes but certainly nowhere near hundreds of TBs under management.  As such, it is only logical to ask if implementing storage tiering will benefit them and, if so, what does such an implementation look like.
As is the case of any hypothetical question, the answer is, "It depends." To arrive at the right answer for their business, they should first consider the following two findings.

• In 2010, a Planet FileStore analysis of storage at Cardiff University found that 93% of the files the university stored were not modified after 60 days. It also found that idle disks consume 90% of the energy of "busy" or "active" disks.
• In a 2011 report, analyst firm IDC found that 80% of today's enterprise data is unstructured and growing at an annual rate of 60%. However only 1-5% of it is used regularly and actively accessed.

So if an SMB finds that its data is growing rapidly and that most of its data is unstructured, the question is not, "If they will need storage tiering?" The question is "When?"

As such, they should follow these three tips as to how to know best when to introduce storage tiering into their environment and how best to implement it.

• First, SMBs are always going to need a certain amount of storage capacity to function as their online storage tier on which to store their active, production unstructured data. This online storage tier will consist of either hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid state drives (SSDs) that provide the highest levels of performance for their active data. So long as all of their data (active and inactive) fits on their online storage tier, SMBs probably only need this tier for their data complemented by a secondary, offsite tier to store backup copies of this data.

• Second, select a single storage solution that supports multiple storage tiers. Storage capacities on HDDs are NOT experiencing 60% year-over-year (YoY) growth rates like data is and certainly not at the 100, 400 or 800% YoY data growth rates that some IT executives already report. So as SMBs select new storage solutions, they should anticipate these higher unstructured data growth rates in their environments and buy storage solutions that accommodate multiple tiers, including online, offline and even offsite tiers to control and manage their storage costs.

• Third, implement a solution with software that provides an automated way to manage the data and move it between tiers. It is one thing to have multiple tiers of storage. It is quite another to make sure that the right data is placed on the right tier at the right time. This is why software that automatically moves data between storage tiers based on policies is a necessity. Absent any software to perform this function, organizations will not be able to effectively use their various storage tiers even if they have them in place.

This is why SMBs who need or anticipate needing storage tiering should consider the Imation InfiniVault as the storage solution to house their unstructured data. Providing multiple tiers of storage in a single solution with the software that is needed to manage and place data on the appropriate storage tier, the InfiniVault provides SMBs with the full range of storage tiering options that they need now or in the future without the management headaches that can accompany the introduction of storage tiering.

Storage tiering may be in vogue right now but an SMB first has to possess a sufficient amount of data to even justify implementing storage tiering in the first place. Then if even they do want to introduce multiple tiers of storage, they will still need software that manages and automatically places data on the different storage tiers.

Using the Imation Infinition, SMBs may implement storage tiering at the right time and on their timetable using whatever tier of storage that their unstructured data requires. Further, the Imation InfiniVault avoids the pitfalls of other solutions as bundling its hardware and software in its all-in-one appliance makes implementing and then managing tiered storage easy and simple for SMBs to accomplish.