Tiered Storage

There’s a vicious cycle of cost that accompanies data growth. A rapid rise in data volumes requires organizations to buy more storage which results not only in capital costs, but in additional cost and complexity related to backup, management, disaster recovery, energy requirements and more.

Tiering storage solutions have the potential to address these issues but present a number of challenges.

• Management. Managing the movement of data to and from performance-optimized and capacity-optimized drives can be enormously complex, and many organizations lack the tools to simplify or automate this task.
• Cost and control. Cloud-based storage, which offers certain economies of scale, nevertheless makes it harder to maintain control over data. And performing analytics on a cloud archive typically requires organizations to move data out of a cold archive first, incurring costs for data egress.
• Support. When tiered storage solution is built on a variety of storage media and data management tools, resolving issues and managing upgrades can be a nightmare.

Dell addresses these challenges with technology that lets you build a tiered storage solution to archive your data to your own cloud, using powerful and automated tools while optimizing for cost, capacity and durability.

ECS is an industry-leading object storage platform that takes the cost and complexity out of managing tiered storage. With ECS, organizations of any size can easily deploy a powerful tiered storage solution within their own private cloud to economically store and manage unstructured data at any scale, for any length of time. By deploying ECS with an on-premise cloud, organizations can tier data to a variety of pools of remote storage, optimizing each pool for cost, capacity, responsiveness and durability, and eliminating the management and data ingest/egress costs of a cloud service provider.

To support traditional and next-generation workloads, ECS is available as software-defined storage, as a turnkey appliance or as a service operated by Dell. ECS also offers:

• Support for object storage, file storage and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System).
• Configurations from 60 TB to 8.6 PB in a single rack, with the ability to easily scale to include multiple racks.
• Geo-distributed data protection with no single point of failure.
• Active multi-site access to all types of files across the globe.
• Storage-as-a-service features that include a self-service portal, detailed metering, multi-tenancy, metadata search and management, billing integration, advanced retention management, and more.

Dell Support Services for ECS and other storage solutions are built on a foundation of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics. Dell ProSupport Suite not only extends the reach of your IT team but enables you to resolve issues before they impact your business.

Our ProSupport Enterprise Suite provide experts, tools, technologies and ease-of-use that deliver the enterprise-class support your organization requires. Our services include:

• 24x7x365 access to experts in hardware and software.
• Predictive analytics for issue prevention and automatic issue detection.
• Flexible levels of support to address needs based on the complexity and business-critical nature of specific systems.

What is tiered storage?

Tiered storage is a strategy for managing the cost of retaining and accessing data. A tiered storage solution enables organizations to move older, less important and infrequently accessed data to less expensive storage solutions, while maintaining active and important data on high-performing storage media.

Why is tiered storage necessary?

As data volumes continue to rise at an increasing pace, organizations are faced with increasing costs for storage media and the expense of managing it, including the costs of staff time, power, cooling, and technology to effectively manage data. Maintaining data on high-performing, tier 1 network attached storage media is highly expensive and unsustainable.

How does tiered storage reduce costs?

Tiered storage solutions can reduce storage costs by enabling organizations to use cheaper storage media for data that does not need to be accessed as frequently or as quickly. ECS enables further cost savings by automating data retention and backup and enabling organizations to use an on-premise private cloud for data storage, eliminating the cost and complexity of moving data in and out of a public cloud solution.