Storage Tiering for File & NAS Systems Ashvin Kamaraju, Vice President Engineer, Symantec Corporation Unstructured data is growing exponentially and forecasted to grow to nearly a thousand exabytes by the year 2011. Enterprises are struggling with the ever increasing costs of storing and managing unstructured data. Multiple classes of storage, with differing price/performance characteristics can help mitigate the costs of managing unstructured data but only when there are meaningful definition of policies that are relevant for the specific business or enterprise. File systems and NAS systems, which serve as repositories for unstructured data, must implement file management policies that automate file life cycle management and migration between tiers of storage, while preserving the ability to access them without operator intervention and providing location transparency to applications. Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is a well known & commercially available technology that implements policy based file migration. However, its adoption has been limited and poor, due largely to the use of tape media as a secondary tier of storage and the limitations inherent in tape media. This session will survey the various storage tiering technologies available today, in file systems and NAS systems, and the policies that automate tiering. It will cover HSM, file systems that can inherently handle multiple classes of disk storage in a single name space/file system, File Area Networks (FAN) that can migrate data between NAS systems and purpose built archival storage subsystems such as MAID arrays. The objective of the session is to provide the attendees with the benefits of storage tiering and the policies that automate tiering to manage costs Learning Objectives
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