Tiered Storage Research & News

Tiered Storage is a data storage technique which automatically moves data between high-cost and low-cost storage tiers or classes. Tiered storage systems exist because high-speed storage devices, such as hard disk drive arrays, are more expensive (per byte stored) than slower devices, such as optical discs and magnetic tape drives. While it would be ideal to have all data available on high-speed tiers all the time, this is prohibitively expensive for many organizations. Instead, tiered storage systems store the bulk of the enterprise’s data on slower devices or classes of storage, and then copy data to faster disk tiers when needed.

Related terms: Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM), data migration, storage virtualization