Tiered Storage Offerings
Choosing the right storage for your applications depends on performance,
capacity and cost. All data is not equal; therefore, data needs to be
allocated on different tiers, with different price points and different
data protection service levels. The following tiered storage model is a
shared storage infrastructure, designed specifically for servers, not
end user’s desktops. File Sharing services (LMS or LCS) with data
protection, designed for end user access to keep and share files
internally have different fee schedules.
Tier |
Max IOPS |
Annual Cost per GB |
Application |
Description |
0 |
51000 |
Contact IMS |
Mission Critical |
Highest performance and fastes storage. Response time critical. |
1 |
7300 |
$0.98 |
Enterprise Tier |
High speed and performance. |
2 |
3900 |
$0.40 |
Business Tier |
Balance of performance and capacity. Business importance. |
3 |
1200 |
$0.30 |
Economy |
Lower cost capacity, low access, fixed content. |
4 |
|
|
Archive |
Durable long-term capacity. |
- IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second)
- performance measurement of backend storage for what storage
system can deliver based upon vendor’s advertised disk
performance. A power Windows 7 user with compute-intensive
running 5+ applications uses up to 25 IOPS. Content SQL database
for SharePoint 2013 has an average IOPS ranging from
0.05 – 0.2 IOPS/GB. IOPS will vary on a number of factors.
Refer to application vendor for recommended IOPS practice.
-
Tier 4 Archive - Available FY17
|
Different service levels of data protection for each storage tier are
available for additional fees. Data protection options include replication,
mirroring, snapshot and backup to disk, tape, or cloud. Contact IMS for
assistance to evaluate data protection service level based on criticality
of data and cost to fit availability, restore, backup, and business
continuity objectives.
Guidelines
-
Tier 0 is just emerging out of tier 1 storage for extremely high
performance, high value information that needs to be presented at
the highest possible speed. Application examples includes: Virtual
Desktop, High Performance Computing applications, etc.
-
Enterprise tier is the most valuable data to the institution,
used in the critical business processes, revenue generating
applications.
-
Business tier supports a broad range of major business applications.
Choosing Tier 2 is a balance between cost, performance and capacity.
-
Move less business critical applications, Test, and Development to
a Tier 2 or 3.
-
File sharing used for shared directories can grow very quickly but
has infrequent access patterns. Over 75% of data on file sharing
storage has not been accessed in more than a year. Data that isn’t
accessed should be on the low cost, high capacity Tier 3.
-
Online content for web servers is infrequently accessed can be
kept at Tier 3.
Example of Storage Tiers and Application Mapping
|
|
Applications |
|
Tier |
Oracle Databases, OLTP |
Web Application |
Business Application |
SQL database server |
File Shares (CIFS/INFS) |
Critical |
0 |
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
Production |
|
|
|
|
2 |
Test |
Production |
Production |
Production |
|
Low Critical |
3 |
Dev, Backup copies |
Static content, images, log files, video |
Test/Dev |
Test/Dev |
Production |
|
Archive |
4 |
Video surveillance and security system history and archives, photos, scientific data, e-mail archive, business continuance |
OLTP – Online transaction processing |