Infortrend Adding Automated Storage Tiering

Infortrend Corporation announced the availability of automated storage tiering on its mid-range ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture) storage family. Automated storage tiering optimizes storage performance, enhances data distribution within storage pools and increases ROI.

Pictured above are Infortrend’s recommended tier settings for ESVA automated storage tiering. These settings are designed to help users get the most out of their tiered architecture and reap the benefits of optimized storage performance, enhanced ROI, and simplified management.

In today’s storage market, a variety of storage media is available to enterprises to meet different service level requirements in their datacenters. Traditionally, however, fine-tuning service levels has required significant cost and effort, making it difficult to properly utilize available resources.

Now, automated storage tiering on Infortrend’s ESVA family of storage solutions provides an architecture that fully leverages the advantages of different storage media, including SSDs for high-performance data storage, by enabling users to flexibly assign applications to four available tiers distinguished by different drive types and RAID levels.

As part of ESVA’s automated storage tiering, data is migrated between tiers based on data usage patterns and user-configured policies. With tiering implemented on the sub-volume level, data can be moved in a granular fashion. Data migration achieves distribution of data, and ensures that SSDs and performance drives have the necessary storage space to deal with mission-critical applications.

The performance and data distribution efficiency achieved with automated storage tiering can help users increase ROI. When compared to a traditional ESVA configuration consisting of one RAID array and one expansion enclosure equipped with 600GB SAS drives, an ESVA configuration with automated storage tiering that consists of only one RAID array equipped with four 100GB SSDs and 12 2TB nearline drives can offer a performance increase of 25 percent to 50 percent and a capacity increase of 5TB, while reducing costs by more than 15 percent.

For users requiring performance, an ESVA configuration with automated storage tiering that consists of one RAID array equipped with eight 100GB SSDs and eight 2TB nearline drives can offer a performance increase of up to 150 percent at the same storage capacity and cost when compared to a traditional ESVA configuration consisting of one RAID array and one expansion enclosure without automated storage tiering.

More efficient storage utilization also reduces the storage footprint and the power consumption. Power consumption is further reduced by the use of SSDs, as these drives consume relatively limited amounts of power.

Thomas Kao, director of product planning at Infortrend, noted: "With the addition of automated storage tiering, ESVA continues to evolve as a leading solution in the mid-range storage market. ESVA systems are now even better equipped to deal with today’s demanding application environments, as they enable enterprises to increase storage efficiency by precisely meeting application performance requirements and migrating data across tiers to ensure the most efficient distribution of data within their storage pools."

Automated storage tiering is available on the ESVA F70-2830, ESVA F60-2830, ESVA E60-2230, and ESVA E60-2130.