Basic Concepts; Stortrends Tiered Storage And Ilm (Scaling Across Tiers) - American Megatrends StorTrends 1300 User Manual

Basic Concepts

Name Description
Logical Drive A group of disks that form a RAID array.
Container A group of logical drives put together to form a container.
Tier A group of logical drives belonging to the same container but have the same costs.
The cost is calculated based on the RAID level, type of drives and so on. A container
may contain multiple tiers, and a tier may contain multiple LDs. The following diagram
gives a pictorial description about the relationship between a Logical Drive, a Container
and a Tier.

StorTrends Tiered Storage and ILM (Scaling across tiers)

StorTrends, even at the block-level, handles information and not just data. Data, when it
is assigned a right context or intelligence, becomes information. The first challenge is to
effectively segment out the data and assign appropriate values. Next comes the policy
aspect of ILM, where these chunks of information are promoted or demoted according to
certain strategies. Many block-level storage vendors track the information at the data
volumes-level and, thereby, dilute the effectiveness. StorTrends assigns and maintains
relevant meta-data information at block-level and parents this information from "the
cradle to the grave".
Chapter Seven : Managing the Storage Appliance 197