What is Tiered Storage?

Tiered storage assigns different categories of data to different types of media with the goal of reducing overall storage costs. Tiered storage architecture ranks data in a hierarchy based on its overall business value. Performance and cost of the media determine the tier in which the data is placed. Also, data is ranked in a tier by the frequency in which the data is accessed by users. Typically, the most important and business-critical data is paired with the fastest storage media, thus it is the most expensive. A traditional configuration has a fast tier of flash storage in order to achieve performance, and secondary data that is less critical may be kept on tape, disk, or in the Cloud. Archive tiers are composed of data that needs to be kept indefinitely.