High-Performance Applications
The storage system incorporates various technologies to boost the system performance. Its high-performance hardware delivers outstanding data access performance. The virtualization technology can improve the storage performance continuously and it shatters performance bottlenecks from future business growth. The intelligent data tiering technology SmartTier automatically detects and prioritizes hotspot data. Therefore, the storage system is a great choice for the high-performance applications.
On-Demand System Performance Boost
In certain scenarios, a storage system may have been provisioned to meet the initial application requirements. However, the future growth of applications often exceeds expectation, and the performance of a traditional storage system will soon become a limiting factor. The virtualization technology of the storage system can address this issue. It dynamically increases storage performance based on current application requirements. This prolongs the system service life and lowers customers' total cost of ownership (TCO).
After the initial purchase, the storage system is equipped with affordable hard disk drives (HDDs) to deliver data storage services. As the service requirements increase and the storage system requires higher performance, administrators can add HDDs or SSDs to boost the system performance. If even greater system performance is required, administrators can replace all the existing HDDs with SSDs to further improve system performance.
This on-demand system performance boost brings the following benefits:
- The system performance is improved gradually, balancing the return on investment (ROI) and the system service life.
- Components for upgrade are available, following the Moore's Law to reduce the purchase cost and the TCO.
Dynamic Storage Tiering for Hotspot Data
In media and website applications, information has a high access frequency, which can generate hotspot data. The hotspot data receives simultaneous read and write requests from a large number of servers, and poses a demanding requirement on storage system performance. Traditional storage systems cannot address such a storage requirement.
The storage system uses its resident intelligent data tiering technology, SmartTier, to identify hotspot data and promote it to high-performance SAS disks or SSDs. If SmartTier later finds out that the hotspot data becomes cold (receiving fewer access requests), it demotes the data to low-performance disks and clears storage space for new hotspot data. Figure 3-1 depicts the working principle of SmartTier.
