Overview

Background

Each type of storage media displays its unique advantages and disadvantages in performance and cost:

• SSDs feature a short response time, a low per-I/O cost, but a high per-GB cost.
• Compared with SSDs, HDDs have longer response time but lower cost. HDDs include NL-SAS and SAS disks. NL-SAS disks have a low per-GB cost, but a long response time and a high per-I/O cost. SAS disks fall in between SSDs and NL-SAS disks in performance and cost.

Definition

SmartTier, an intelligent data storage tiering feature developed by Huawei, dynamically relocates files by size, type, file name extension, or activity level to preset storage media based on user-defined policies. It improves the performance of storage systems and minimizes TCO.

Benefits

• High performance of storage systems

  Relocates active data to high-performance SSDs, and inactive data to large-capacity and low-cost HDDs. SmartTier provides active data with a fast response and high input/output operations per second (IOPS). As a result, the overall performance of storage systems improves significantly.

• Low storage costs for users

  Reduces storage costs by relocating inactive data to large-capacity and low-cost HDDs.