Tiered Storage and Caching Decisions

“Storage is stale,” says the chipset guys, says the OS guys, says the flash guys. Storage is as storage needs to be – storage, a place to put your stuff. Just like in the real world you don’t park your commuter car in the garage, that’s for your project or muscle car, why would you only listen to a guy selling you SSDs about wher to put your *megaloads* of data? Tiered storage is all the rage, let’s use faster storage in front of slower storage in front of archive storage; sounds like RAID vendors and tape guys all over again. This presentation will look at tiered storage, changes in the fabric of the basic unit of storage – the LBA, and how to actually accelerate your storage so the *user* of the data sees the difference – because we all get measured there, not at the data sheet..

Learning Objectives

Learn how storage, IO, and resources in your system are impacted by the decisions you make in attempting to manage those resources.
Become familiar with the underlying methods of storage caching, what’s been around forever, and what’s on the horizon.
Understand why storage as it exist today is going to be around for a while, and how to make best use of those resources.