With the incredible growth of unstructured data that organizations want to maintain and use for analysis and insights, tiered storage is a smart approach that keeps this data in the best locations and makes it easier to find and use when the business needs it.

1. The Benefits
of Tiered
Storage
Organizations capture and store a great deal of
information and data on a daily basis from a wide range
of sources. This information is structured (databases
records), semi-structured (email), and unstructured
(documents and files). Because there’s so much of it,
storage managers try to find ways to store it so that the
most important information is readily accessible and at
the same time try to keep storage costs reasonable.
“IDC’s The Digital Universe study projects that the
total amount of data created and copied annually
was 4.4 zettabytes (10 10 , or 4.4 billion 1TB disk
drives) at the end of 2013 and will grow by a factor
of 10 by 2020.“
--David Floyer, The Growth and Management of
Unstructured Data
This where tiered storage comes into play.
SNIA (Storage Network Industry Association)
defines tiered storage as, “Storage that is physically
partitioned into multiple distinct classes based on
price, performance, or other attributes….Data may
be dynamically moved among classes within a tiered
storage implementation based on access activity and
other considerations.”
Tiered storage sounds simple. You put different types
of data and information on different storage tiers. But
it’s not as simple as it may seem. There are some big
decisions to make before you even define your actual
storage tiers.
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2. Tiered Storage Starts with
Data Management
Working with
Storage Tiers
Not all data is considered equal. While organizations create, capture and
store gigabytes and even terabytes of data every year, they only use a small
portion of it on a day-to-day basis.
Data management is the process of understanding what data an
organization has, how often it’s used, how important it is, and how it needs
to be handled when it’s no longer useful.
SNIA defines several information classes that you can use to start to define
your data. These are:
• Mission critical
• Business vital
• Business important
• Important productive
• Not Important
• Discard
The typical approach to creating storage tiers is to create three tiers: Primary, Secondary, and
Archival.
Primary storage tiers are called Tier 1; secondary is Tier 2; and archival is Tier 3. You can, of
course, define more tiers depending on your business requirements. The most important
tier is Tier 1, and it’s where you store your most important data and data that is frequently
accessed in the running of the business.
Tier 1 storage hardware and software is high-quality media and the most expensive storage
you have. As your tiers increase, the storage costs go down. So, for example, if Tier 3 is archival
storage, you may use Tape or DVD, which is much cheaper than say a Solid State Disk (SSD)
you might use for Tier 1.
The Benefits of Tiered Storage 2
Use some or all of these classes as a starting point, or create your own. Once you have identified the importance of each type of data you use,
you’ll want to document how it’s used, as well as how often it’s accessed (frequently, periodically, occasionally, rarly, never, by request). Other
ways to define data classes include financial and compliance considerations. Often a data classification process is done by a team, not just IT.
The team may include representatives from areas such as the business, security, legal, and information management. Any department within
your organization who has some responsibility for the data should be included in classification discussions.
Defining your data classes is considered the hardest part of a tiered storage strategy. This may be partly due to trying to get the business to
discuss their data priorities with your team.
Once you have defined your data classes, you should assign each data class to a storage tier.

3. Tiered storage helps reduce storage costs, and that’s important because IT is constantly
under pressure to keep the costs of data storage low, but at the same time, not
jeopardize the data.
Tiered storage can help achieve greater efficiency. Storing all your data on a single tier
means that every application and every user in your organization is accessing the same
storage. This can lead to performance issues for applications and slow access for users
to who need to get their data quickly.
By moving less important applications and data off to lower tiers, mission critical
applications are more efficient and perform better.
Satisfying compliance requirements is also a benefit of tiered storage. Many
organizations are required to keep information long after it’s used in the daily run of the
business. By creating archival storage, organizations can keep data for a long time, but
not have it taking up priority space or affecting performance in a mission-critical tier.
The Benefits of
Tiered Storage
The Benefits of Tiered Storage 3
When you define your storage tiers, you have to think about a number of things. Hardware and software costs are key, but so is power
consumption, floor space, and installation and training.
Another key consideration is the SLAs you have with each business department, or more specifically, each application. SLAs indicate
important information that affects tiered storage such as performance, capacity, functionality, availability, backups, disaster recovery
and others.
graphic courtesy of ILM Tutorial- Tiered Storage

4. The Benefits of Tiered Storage 4
Tiered Storage and
Unstructured Data
Different types of data create different challenges for tiered storage. There
are three types of data to deal with:
• Unstructured: documents and files
• Semi-structured: email
• Structured: records in a database
Unstructured data is the fastest growing data type for businesses today and
includes data such as video, images, files and documents, web pages, and
more. Semi-structured data is often included in the discussion of how to
deal with storing unstructured data.
Unstructured data is important to organizations because it can be analyzed
and insights gained that support data-driven decision making. But all this
data isn’t necessarily used on a day to day basis, and different portions of
unstructured data are used at different times depending on the questions
and insights business users need.
This is why tiered storage is such a great approach for handling the volumes
of unstructured data that organizations capture. Unstructured data needs to
be classified the same as all other data, but once it is, much of it can likely be
moved onto lower storage tiers, so it doesn’t interfere with mission-critical
data.
Storage managers also need to consider how they will move unstructured
data between tiers, or to a compliance archive or other storage tier, in
addition to privacy and security considerations of the data classes.

5. The Benefits of Tiered Storage 5
Wrapping Up
Tiered storage is a great approach to managing the volumes of data
organizations capture every day. But it’s important to remember that
tiered storage is hardware and software, and a set of processes. The
hardest part of implementing tiered storage is classifying your data
and then assigning storage tiers.
With the incredible growth of unstructured data that organizations
want to maintain and use for analysis and insights, tiered storage is a
smart approach that keeps this data in the best locations and makes
it easier to find and use when the business needs it.
Tiered storage and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) go hand in hand. SNIA
defines ILM as, “..the policies, processes, practices and tools used to align the business
value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure from
the time information is conceived through its final disposition.”
With this definition in mind, defining storage tiers requires thinking about additional
storage attributes (some of which we’ve already mentioned) such as:
• Performance: How well the application is required to perform and how fast data is
sent to the end user.
• Scalability: How easy is it to increase or decrease the storage, can it be partitioned
and so on.
• Backup and Recovery: What are the backup and recovery requirements of the data.
• Replication: Does the data need to be replicated?
• Availability: What are the availability requirements of the data (24/7?)
• Operation/Management
Information
Lifecycle
Management
is Key

6. www.everteam.com
info@everteam.com
About
Everteam
Everteam brings over 25 years’ experience and innovation to the field of Enterprise Content
Management. In an ever-increasing legal and compliance environment, Everteam’s range
of products support the improvement of content –driven processes, and enable enterprise
customers to easily monitor and align their content strategies for overall organizational
efficiency and effectiveness.
+33 (0)1 72 71 33 3
336, rue Saint-Honoré,
75001 Paris – France
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