Adds automated tiering capability for solid state drives
IBM recently introduced software called Easy Tier that can be used to automate the movement of data to solid state drives in the company’s System Storage DS8000 disk arrays. The company also introduced other enhancements to its storage products including the use of 2TB drives in its XIV storage system and LTO-5 support in its tape libraries.
Easy Tier works in an automated process to migrate data between hard disk drives and SSDs and replaces the manual movement of data IBM used before. It places the most-often accessed data on SSDs and judges which data that is by ongoing performance monitoring.
With Easy Tier, IT can also manually and non-disruptively relocate full logical volumes around the DS8000. Easy Tier also can move sub-volume data to SSD from Fibre Channel or Serial ATA hard disk drives. The product monitors each 1GB extent of storage (based on groups of 64KB stripes of storage) for I/O access and stages the data for a daily migration plan. It is not like Compellent’s Data Progression or EMC’s FAST software in that it doesn’t rely on policy-based data migration. Easy Tier is available at no charge.
Users without SSD tiers of storage can use a new tool called Storage Tier Advisor to approximate the need for SSD storage and tell how SSDs will benefit their current application workloads.
