Toshiba recommends tiered storage infrastructures

27th March 2014

Toshiba

Nat Bowers

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Whitepaper

With increasing demand for faster access, Toshiba is to focus its enterprise product offering on providing solutions for tiered storage infrastructures that can be designed to cost-effectively meet the storage needs of the modern data centre. Tiered storage architectures utilise the key benefits of eSSDs and HDDs to provide the appropriate storage solution according to how frequently and how quickly the data needs to be accessed.

Automated algorithms select the most effective form of storage depending on cost, performance, availability, protection and recovery speed requirements. Access speeds are graduated, starting with the highest at the top of the pyramid and decreasing to the lowest at the bottom.

The lowest tier houses offline and nearline data that is required for archiving, back-up and compliance. This data is typically stored in 7,200 RPM HDDs. The ascending tiers store business critical and online data with the faster 15,000 RPM HDDs towards the top of the pyramid. Super-fast eSSDs sit at the top of the pyramid, and these are used to store mission critical data that needs to be accessed frequently.

Toshiba believes that it is the only company to provide a full range of drives that includes high performance eSSDs and enterprise HDDs as well as nearline HDDs. Recent product launches that support the tiered architecture approach include: the PX02SNx and HK3R ranges of eSSDs designed for read-intensive applications; the AL13SX range of 15,000 RPM HDDs for mission critical applications; and the MG04 series of high capacity nearline drives which are available in capacities up to 5TB.

According to a whitepaper commissioned by Toshiba and published by IDC, NAND flash-based storage is set to account for up to 15% of data centre storage. The whitepaper, titled "Beyond Capacity: Storage Architecture Choices for the Modern Datacenter" discusses many of the difficult decisions that companies face when implementing storage solutions.