No matter where you look, the cost of the newest technology is rising for businesses. Older tech drops in price fast. The newest kit brings enough complexity that costs stay high. So companies are getting more deliberate about how they design internal IT, which brings prices down. One practice that is helping businesses achieve this is storage tiering.
What is Storage Tiering?
Storage tiering is a networking method that sorts your data into sections by importance. Sort the data you hold, then decide which applications need which kind of storage. From there you can allocate data to various storage services. For example, low-importance data could be relegated to slower drives or lower cost services.
How Does It Work?
Start with your IT department and analyze the data you hold. Divide it by security and accessibility needs. Together you would plan which systems and applications are of most importance and progressively move down the list to the least essential applications or data. Once that analysis is done, your IT team can pick a tiered system to match. Each tier then costs the least it can for the security and access it actually needs.
Benefits of Storage Tiering
There are two main benefits of storage tiering, and both are essential in helping companies reduce the cost of their data backup and recovery. The first benefit is that storage tiering reserves your most expensive storage for the crucial applications. Those are the ones you flagged as high priority. This allows your company to use your higher-quality storage systems for the applications that your company relies on the most so that they are available when needed.
The second benefit of storage tiering is that it allows you to choose lower-cost storage for the remaining applications and data. Breaking storage needs into tiers of importance gives you a cheaper system overall. You do not give up performance, access, recovery or backups to get it. Effective tiering may even allow you to work out deals between different service providers with different specialties.
Reducing Costs With Storage Tiering
Every business knows that their data storage is one of their most important and potentially expensive needs. By using a storage tiering option, your company can reduce costs by not paying premium storage rates for data that simply doesn’t need it. Performance improves because your most crucial applications sit on your fastest storage. Everything less important moves to cheaper storage. You can still use and access it whenever you need, so the only thing that changes is the bill.
Related reading
Ready to Learn More About the Practicalities of Storage Tiering?
If you are ready to learn more about how tiered storage can help your business lower operating costs, then contact our team today, and we will be glad to assist you in coming up with a plan that will suit your business’ unique needs.
Discover how Volico can help you with your Storage and Backup needs.
