With the recent profusion of tiered storage solutions into the enterprise storage market, organizations are increasingly adopting tiering strategies to accommodate rapid data growth while controlling costs. Almost all major offerings leverage multiple types of drives, with varying capacities and performance levels, and attempt to match data with the optimal drive type based on storage profiles. Typically, mission-critical data is stored on high-performance drives, while "less important" data is moved to high-capacity drives.

Yet most of those solutions fail to maximize the potential benefits of tiered storage. Poor integration of tiering into the storage platform; a lack of granular, real-time system intelligence; labor-intensive, inefficient data movement schemes; and limited scalability keep many solutions from meeting real-world business needs. Applications are tacked onto existing storage infrastructures. Data is migrated as large "all or nothing" pages, often according to outdated information. The tiering profiles are limited in scope, generally requiring manual intervention. Data must be reformatted from a disk group to a pooled configuration. And solution licensing is restricted to a particular hardware platform. Such limitations completely offset the cost- and time-saving benefits of truly virtualized storage. Read this white paper to learn more.