Data Tiering Has Never Worked
Posted by
IT Dog on Mon, Jan 23, 2012 @ 03:04 PM
Time to Send the Big Dogs Another Check: Auto Tiering!I have talked before (in the vendor lock in blog) about the great solutions (e.g. HSM) the big dogs in the storage industry have come up with to help the problems they have created with all that expensive stuff they have sold you. Well the latest industry invention to get you to part with your company’s money is “Auto Tiering.” “Hurray! All my problems are solved now Dog! Auto Tiering is here!” Not so fast.#1 Hot Technology for 2011SearchStorage put themselves out there early in 2011with their “Top 10 Hot Technology for 2011” list. Gotta hand it to them. It takes guts to predict the future and then have to look back later in the year to see how prescient they were. Well, can you guess what their #1 Hot Technology for 2011 was? Well, I kinda I gave it away with the title of this blog – it was Auto Tiering! You can stand up and clap please for Auto Tiering now because it was predicted to kick ass in 2011! Yeah Baby!Not So Hot Technology for 2011SearchStorage also puts themselves out there every year with their ‘looking back’ list: “Top 10 Storage Trends for 2011”. This list is where they close the circle a bit with their Top 10 “Hot” list. And guess what was in the #10 slot of Storage Trends for 2011 – “Still waiting for tiered storage.” Dave Raffo (one of the contributors to the “Hot” list above) of SearchStorage goes on to say “Despite most major vendors adding automated sub-volume tiering software in recent years, adoption has barely ticked up.” The vendors (those big dogs again) want to sell and guess who has to buy – you!Ashish Nadkarni, while an analyst at Taneja Group, echoed this view when he said in a June 2011 interview: “Auto tiering is still up and coming, and it definitely has a long way to go before it's considered to be mainstream.” He further went on to say “At the end of the day, auto tiering is there to replace the manual labor. [It’s not] guaranteed that manual tiering is cheaper and more efficient, even if you have a storage pro at the head of this, because there are only so many hours you can dedicate in a day to do this.” Which brings me back to my old saying – I am a dog with only so many years to live. I do not want to waste a single day….and certainly do not have time to waste on this whole idea of tiering.A Better Solution to Auto or Manual TieringSo we are back to the same discussion we have had before. You tell me “I buy all this great hardware from the vendor, buy a bunch of software to run it from the vendor (remember vendor lock in?) and then they want me to buy something new--- Auto Tiering software, to run it even better.” Those sales guys with the big Mercedes really love doing business with you. Maybe you can buy their worthless Cancun time share from them also. And I tell you what I have been telling you all along and Tony Soprano would say: “fagettaboutit.” What you really need is simpler solution. The best type of tiering may be no tiering at all. The best solution may be to put the some of resources you spend on tiering (your time and the company’s money) into some generic SSDs (not the vendor lock in kind) that you can deploy as cache and use caching software to improve performance. Much lower cost than the vendor lock in solution and better performance without the headaches of tiering.Tell Me About ItHave you tried data tiering? How much time and money have you spent doing that and what was the ROI?