• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

virtualized storage app that migrates data based on usage?

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
5,833
Is there a virtualized storage app out there that will migrate data from tier1 to tier2 storage based on data usage while remaining seamless to the VM OS and end-users?

Say you have a Sharepoint server, and a user uploads a couple TB of images to suck up your tier1 storage. Then the software notices that the image files haven't been accessed in however long and it migrates the data off to tier2 storage while leaving the paths intact so the process is completely transparent to the end-user and the VM guest OS.
 
No virtualized app I know of. Really, the only true commercial array out there doing this right now is EMC's FAST auto tiering. It can migrate from SATA to FC/SAS to EFD and back and forth.
 
Nate7311 said:
The Equallogic iSCSI arrays do this as well.
Click to expand...

Really? Running what software? I am looking at SAN HQ and the Group Manager and I don't see the option to migrate data off of the EQL onto something slower.
 
A quick look at the equallogic site shows that it does to data tiering and will move data between internal SSD and SAS disks based on usage.

However this depends on what data you want to store and how the equallogic device is dealing with the tiering. Using your sharepoint example, assuming a default install then all the sharepoint data is kept in the content database so unless it's block level aware then you would have issues. You could also look at file groups or some of those 3rd party BLOB applications and moving the content yourself but you would need to be really savvy with Sharepoint before you would even consider that.
 
fantasticdan said:
A quick look at the equallogic site shows that it does to data tiering and will move data between internal SSD and SAS disks based on usage.
Click to expand...
I see, though that's not what I had in mind. I was looking for something that runs on top of all storage and migrates between storage units based on usage rather than migrate within the same unit.

The Sharepoint was a bad example on my part but it actually illustrates a good point; Virtualization in general not only abstracts the computing hardware but also the storage hardware, or at least it could and when it does things become complicated quickly.

Consider a VMware VMs which has an OS drive (BOOT) and a storage drive (STOR), both are located on Tier1 storage. That storage has a lun, within that lun are the the two vmdk files for BOOT and STOR. If there are some files within STOR that are only infrequently accessed then they would be a good candidate to migrate them off to some slower storage. But how? That would require that a STOR vmdk would be created elsewhere and some files would be kept there while other high access files would be kept within STOR on Tier1? Not really feasible.

Then one could migrate STOR as a whole to slower storage but that would slow all file access on STOR down, not just access to files that are infrequently used.
 
A lot of the tiering solutions work at the block level, moving the hot blocks to faster storage, and the less utilized blocks to cheaper storage.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top