Tiered storage means establishing a hierarchy of storage systems based on service requirements and cost. Why leave inactive or expired data on your expensive primary enterprise arrays? What if there were a lower cost alternative? Well, there is, and it’s called storage tiering. With typically up to 80% of the data found in corporate networks being fixed content data that does not belong on the primary storage, the cost advantage of moving this data to lower cost storage platforms is immense.
What has made tiered storage even more attractive is the explosion of low-cost, high capacity Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk array systems. These capacity-oriented systems are indeed ideal within tiered storage architectures as they offer cost effective platforms for secondary storage, long-term storage, backup, and compliance storage.
For compliant storage, Arcplace makes extensive use of WORM (write once, read many) disk storage functionality which provides non-erasable, non-rewritable data permanence. From a data protection perspective, the process of committing data to WORM status can be thought of in the same manner as storing data on an optical platter. Like an optical platter "burned" with data, the functionality protects data committed to WORM status from any possible alteration or deletion until their retention period has expired.
By adding archiving applications that support storage hierarchies as well as WORM storage media, the process of migrating data between storage tiers and storage types (standard or WORM) can be fully automated. This ensures optimal usage of the storage infrastructure and automated execution of the company archiving policies. Finally, by keeping the data online, access to archived information is immediate, and automatic integrity checks can be performed throughout the entire lifetime of data records.
Arcplace tiered storage solutions:
- Deliver end-to-end solutions that include storage, applications and services
- Allow freeing-up of primary or tier 1 storage by up to 80%
- Significantly reduce backup costs and shorten restore procedures
- Enable companies to meet government regulation requirements for long-term data retention
- Provide fast online access to all electronic data
- Ensure the integrity of protected data against modification or premature deletion
- Tiers 2 and 3 can be operated in-house or by Arcplace as Managed or On-Demand Services
