With volumes of stored data growing seemingly without limits, organizations are struggling to meet their burgeoning storage demands. While the acquisition cost of high-performance disk storage continues to decrease, the cost of maintaining and managing large volumes of primary storage makes a storage strategy based solely on disk increasingly undesirable.

Meanwhile, hundreds of SGI customers with data intensive environments are already meeting their critical data storage and management requirements using SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF) tier virtualization. This paper explores the benefits of DMF for streamlining data management for the most data-intensive environments. Usage scenarios are discussed along with the core technologies that have made DMF so successful.