Hybrid Storage: Automatic Drive Tiering and Thin Provisioning for Virtualization

The RAID team often gets questions from customers who want to move from traditional HDD storage solutions to an application more suitable for virtual environments.  The goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and work loads.  At the same time, virtualized environments require increased capacity and storage capabilities in a more cost effective, less resource/energy-intensive solution.

For the needs stated above, hybrid arrays, which aim to lower the cost per I/O, are becoming increasingly popular in HPC environments that we are customizing and installing across many industries.  Two of the superstar components that we are leveraging via the ARI-100 Series, and two of the main reasons why the ARI series is so good at advanced data virtualization is 1.  automatic drive tiering and 2. thin provisioning.

Why Auto Drive Tiering and Thin Provisioning Are Important to Virtualization

Automatic Drive Tiering:  The ARI-100 system virtualizes both the SSDs and HDDs at the sub-LUN level using 4 MB pages distributed across multiple RAID sets. Intelligent Tiering algorithms then continuously monitor I/O access patterns and automatically move Hot Data to the SSDs to maximize I/O operations

Thin Provisioning:  With thin-provisioning capability, IT managers can dedicate available storage space to volumes only when actually needed and add storage capacity transparently to any application, also as needed. This approach enables organizations to minimize capital expenditures initially and scale capacity incrementally over time.

These capabilities bring a level of automated and semi-automated resource allocation that results in an improvement in the cost per I/O, as well as the scalability of virtualized environments.

For more information on the best custom solution for advanced storage virtualization, contact our technical sales Experts today!