Storage area networking (SAN) technologies address the need by enterprises of all sizes to manage explosive data growth. The sheer volume of data that IT organizations need to manage continues to grow with increasing velocity. To add to this challenge, the standards for maintaining and managing this data have grown more stringent, as enterprises embrace data retention schemes set forth in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) and other regulatory regimes. To help manage data under these conditions, growing numbers of enterprises have adopted tiered data storage, an Efficient Enterprise approach that matches storage media with specific performance and cost characteristics to the workloads they most effectively serve.
Dell EqualLogic PS Series virtualized iSCSI SANs provide IT organizations numerous techniques for storage tiering as a standard part of their all-inclusive feature set. These techniques extend the automation at the core of the PS Series design philosophy, while allowing broad customization of storage tiers to suit a wide range of business and organizational requirements.
Tiered SAN resources can both reduce costs (by keeping “cool” data off costly high-performance media) and improve performance (by purposefully dedicating high-performance media to the applications which demand it). Uniquely flexible in design, EqualLogic tiering tools allow IT managers to determine where to apply PS Series heuristics and to what degree. Certain volumes – those associated with business-critical operations, for instance – can be manually assigned to specific arrays, while others can be relegated to the intelligent automation of the PS Series SAN. Should the status of these volumes change over time, they can be either moved into or removed from dedicated pools.
In addition, the PS6000/6010XVS – a highly specialized SAN array that combines SSD and 15,000 RPM SAS drives within a single enclosure – advances Auto-Tiering even further, performing tiering on data sets within volumes, which can improve performance and efficiency for such multi-tiered workloads as virtual desktop implementation (VDI), certain database stores, and other applications.