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Automated Tiered Storage Coming to Desktops?
roj3 writes "Tiered storage has been the scourge of administrators because the vendors tell us to hold meetings with all departments and then classify data to storage tier based on its type or relative importance. eWeek has a story about a new approach to tiered storage — sorting it all by usage patterns. Regularly used data goes on high-performance storage, idle data goes on slower/cheaper storage. Volumes and files even span several types of drives or RAID levels. Is automated tiered storage headed to desktops?"
I can see the usefulness of this technology over a busy network with multiple users and masses of files and storage... I just can't see needing anything more than a mirror&stripe RAID array on a PC with only one user. Even that could be considered excessive.
This is exactly what everyone is looking for. People defrag their hard drives in the hopes to increase performance. There is no reason why storage that is accessed more shouldn't be on the high performance drives. Or at least some sort of class rating that defines what storage may need high performance. For example, automatically installing and saving 3D Max to a RAID 0 media, and saving word documents to the lesser-performing drives.
I try to follow this idea all the time with my system. Fast stuff goes on RAID 0, slow stuff, and backup stuff goes on the ole' 200 GB backup drive.
I was using systems that did this 10 years ago. Granted, back then it was disk+tape not different speed disks, but it's the exact same thing.
Looks to me like an excuse to charge 8-10x what you should be paying for storage of that size.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
"idle data goes on slower/cheaper storage"
So that special little something that you need once a year, but when you need it, you need it RIGHT NOW is tied to the foot of a pigeon fluttering around the warehouse somewhere. Frequency of use does NOT denote importance.
Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.
From its beginnings, the Hard Drive has leveled the playing field for all files. Everday files can have their content read by thousands, even millions of processes.
The Coalition of Unused Files believes that the desktop is a crucial engine for personal and economic growth. They are working together to urge System Admins to preserve IDE Neutrality, the First Amendment for the Desktop Hard Drive that ensures that the Desktop remains open to innovation and progress.
$50k for a 6TB fileserver? What's that extra $40000 paying for that a normal fileserver loaded with RAM can't do just as fast?
Cheetos go in the easy-to-reach cabinet next to the fridge.
Beer goes in the fornt on the top shelf of the fridge, milk (eventually cheese, typically) goes on the bottom shelf in the back.
This is automated, since I simply shove things onto the shelves when I get home from the supermarket. Anything I consume and replace ends up at the front. Anything I buy because I 'should' be eating it (like fiber biscuits, or whatever) ends up pushed to the back.
It's automated via metatag, too. Anything tagged 'ice cream' goes in the door of the freezer, anything tagged 'vegetable' gets relegated somewhere in the back, where it quickly develops an inch of ice crystals, to slowly dry out to a freezer-burnt state of suspended animation until I buy a new fridge unit.
This costs no more than regular kitchen storage space, but if you'd like a custom design for you and your loved ones, my consulting fee is $75/hr, or a bag of chips and a six-pack.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Automatic tiered storage is definitely coming, but probably not in the form of multiple disks that run at different speeds or RAID levels.
Microsoft announced a while back that Windows Vista would support three technologies designed to improve disk speed called SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, and ReadyDrive. SuperFetch is simply a way of preloading applications and data when the OS anticipates that you'll be loading those soon.
ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive both utilize persistent memory caches to speed up access to the disk.
ReadyBoost treats normal USB keys and flash disks like temporary caching locations for data from the disk.
ReadyDrive is essentially the term Microsoft uses to described their support for hybrid hard drives, which are disks that have a built in flash memory module that's used as a persistent cache.
Not only do hybrid disks dramatically increase performance, but they also result in huge power savings for mobile devices like laptops and media players.
Yes, there are exceptional cases, like the President's access to the Nuclear Briefcase. It hasn't been used for real in a long time if ever but when he needs it it had better be close at hand.
Oddly enough, I think most people in the world would prefer that it wasn't close at hand when Bush decides he wants it.
A better example is fire extinguishers -- most of them will literally never be used, but there's a very good reason to ensure that they are readily available.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
No. Absent other data, it only denotes frequency of use, period. Playboy.com gets more hits than the general ledger webapp if you unblock your company firewall, but the general ledger is more important to the company.
There is actually very little correlation between what the average user wants and what s/he needs, as is empirically obvious. If the image from the "fly-fishing.com" website that they've set to come up as their background image every morning fails to load, they can still work, but if the once-a-year corporate audit checklist gets put on slow, old storage and then gets lost in a hardware failure, the company stock price may flutter and certainly heads will roll in the corporate IS department.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.