Storage Performance Management: How Tiered Environments Can Lower Costs and Improve Performance

by Gilbert Houtekamer, Wim Oudshoorn
March 8, 2010

Storage system design always involves a trade-off between cost and performance. A storage system full of small, fast disks may provide great performance and throughput, but the benefits don’t always justify the costs. “Tiering,” or using a mixture of faster and slower disks, is likely to produce a better price-to-performance ratio. You can reserve the fastest, most costly disks for the workloads that really need them and let large disks handle less active workloads.