Overview Of Tiers - HP XP7 User Manual

the pool is configured using multiple kinds of physical disk drives. Placing data that needs
high performance while reducing storage costs by using high cost disks such as SSDs as
efficiently as possible, resulting in data that is accessed infrequently being placed on lower
cost physical storage.
Automatically migrate small portions of host volumes to the most suitable tier according to
access frequency. Frequently accessed data is migrated to higher speed, higher cost data
drives (for example, SSD). Infrequently accessed data is migrated to lower cost and lower
speed data drives (for example, SAS7.2K) to use the storage efficiently.
NOTE: It is important to plan your Smart Tiers Z implementation with the lowest performing tier
able to satisfy the minimum performance requirements.
Smart Tiers Z simplifies storage administration by automating and eliminating the complexities of
efficiently using tiered storage. It automatically moves pages of data in Thin Provisioning Z V-VOLs
to the most appropriate storage media, according to workload, to maximize service levels and
minimize total cost of storage.
Smart Tiers Z gives you:
Improved storage resource usage
Improved return on high-cost storage tiers
Reduced storage management effort
More automation
Nondisruptive storage management
Reduced costs
Improved overall performance
Smart Tiers Z can be used by Remote Web Console, RAID Manager, or HP XP7 Smart Manager
for Mainframe (Smart Manager for Mainframe).
If Remote Web Console or RAID Manager is used, the following resources assigned to the storage
administrator can be used:
Tiers of pools
Tiers of THP V-VOLs
If Smart Manager for Mainframe is used, the following resources assigned to the mainframe
administrator can be used:
Tiers of storage groups
Tiers of THP V-VOLs that are assigned to a host
For details about HP XP7 Smart Manager for Mainframe, see HP XP7 Smart Manager for Mainframe
User Guide.

Overview of tiers

When not using Smart Tiers Z , data is allocated to only one kind of data drive (without regard to
the workload) because the volumes are configured with only one kind of data drive. When using
Smart Tiers Z, performance is automatically allocated to the higher-speed THP pool volumes and
the lower speed drive to the low workload portion of a volume. This improves performance and
reduces costs.
Smart Tiers Z places the host volume's data across multiple tiers of storage contained in a pool.
There can be up to three tiers (high-, medium-, and low-speed layers) in a pool. Smart Tiers Z
determines tier usage based on data access levels. It allocates pages with high I/O load to the
upper tier, which contains a higher speed drive, and the page with low I/O load to the lower tier,
which contains a lower speed drive.
16 Introduction to provisioning