Organizations depend on data for growth. Analyzing data helps business owners to come up with effective strategies of conducting day-to-day business activities. In line with the importance of data to an organization, companies are coming up with cost effective and efficient ways of storing data. Storage of present management changes depending on the person who is responsible for it. It can be an Information Technology expert or a basic data manager at a company, for instance (Webster, 2014). Companies such as IBM increasingly rely on tiered storage as an effective means of storing data. Tiered storage is a data storage approach that involves assigning a wide range of data groups to diverse sorts of storage medias to reduce the average cost of storage (Webster, 2014). In tiered storage, data are stored based on performance and accessibility requirements. This paper will discuss the benefits associated with the tiered storage approach.
Benefits of Tiered Storage
With increased needs to store data efficiently, online data maintenance has become a major concern for organizations. Understanding the implications of losing satisfactory data is critical in coming up with a strategic data storage system and information lifecycle management approach. Since the tiered storage approach provides an easy access to data, it saves on time. Therefore, one importance of a tiered data storage approach is that it improves the efficiency on operation.
Using tiered storage approach is closely associated with cost reduction. Businesses that utilize tiered system approaches benefit in reducing not only restoration, but also backup times (Webster, 2014). Businesses with aggressive recovery time objectives utilize disk-based backup approaches to eliminate the unreliability linked to tape use. As window backups continue to shrink, businesses are in need of data storage approaches that initiate high-speed transfer of data. Tiered storage system such as the ATA disk technology provides cost effective means of data transfer.
Organizations that must adhere to compliance requirements are in search of content addressable storage systems that will offer long-term maintenance and assured validity (Webster, 2014). Since content addressable storage systems are available as software and hardware solutions, there is a need to understand its costs and benefits. Content addressable storage associated with the tiered systems is efficient for environments that require authenticity to achieve their long-term objectives. Therefore, another benefit of using the tiered storage system is that, through its content addressable storage, tiered storage guarantees data authenticity to the user.
Lastly, tiered storage approach provides network-attached storages (NAS). Most organizations facilitate server consolidation by installing network-attached storage. In the past, organizations installed the direct-attached storages approaches as file servers. Although the direct-attached storages provided the Network File System and Common Internet File System storage requirements, it has become a costly venture (Webster, 2014). Network-attached storages provide single-purpose devices that offer Network File System and Common Internet File System linked to storage that have the ability to scale from a mere GP to PB. Therefore, a benefit associated with the use of a tiered storage is that it provides network-attached storages that can store up to one Petabyte.
This paper has established that the tiered storage approach has much more benefits than costs. The main advantages associated with the use of a tiered storage approach include cost effectiveness, efficiency, increased data storage capacity and improved authenticity. In line with the presented benefits, there is a need for organizations to utilize the tiered storage approach. By adopting the tiered storage approach, organizations will have an opportunity to concentrate on its goals and objective.
Reference
Webster, J. (2014). What is tiered storage?: Definition from WhatIs.com. SearchStorage. Web.