Storage tiering with deduplication

Storage tiering is a feature that dynamically moves data between different types of storage to meet space, performance and cost requirements. Storage tiering policies place the most frequently accessed data onto the highest performance storage and less frequently accessed or old age data onto low performant or cheaper storage that at any given point of time one copy of data is present across all the storage tiers.

 

In case of environments where deduplication is enabled, same data chunk might get referenced by the multiple files/backups which may be cold or hot. So, it is not correct to directly apply tiering policy on such colder files and move all the blocks corresponding to cold files to low cost tiers, as same blocks might be getting referred by files which are latest and hot. It is very important that correct data chunks are identified and moved to appropriate storage tier when tiering policies are enabled. Otherwise overall performance will get impacted. 

 

This presentation talks about a solution on how to identify the correct data chunks to move across tiers when deduplication is enabled.

 

Learning Outcomes

a. Introduction of storage tiering

 

b. Introduction of how deduplication works

 

c. Challenges with Storage tiering in dedupe environments