In the current storage markets and technology, storage tiers are defined by availability, functionality, performance and costs. In fact data can move up and down tiers as time and business required.

Tier "0" is not new in storage market but for implementation purposes it has been difficult to accommodate because it requires best performance and lowest latency. Enterprise Flash disks (Solid State Disks) capable to meet this requirement. It is possible to get more performance for company most critical applications. The performance can be gained through using Flash drives supported in VMAX and DMX-4 systems. One Flash drive can deliver IOPS equivalent to 30 15K RPM hard disk drives with approximately 1 ms application response time. Flash memory achieves performance and the lowest latency ever available in the enterprise class storage array.

Tier “0” application can be closely coupled with other storage tier within Symetrix series for consistency and efficiency, reducing cost of company for manual data layout or data migration from old disk to new high speed disk.

Tier “0” storage can be used to accelerate online transaction processing, accelerating performance with large indices and frequently accessed database tables i.e. Oracle, DB2 databases and SAP R/3. Tier 0 can also improve performance in batch processing and shorten batch processing in windows environments.

Tier “0” storage performance will help application that needs the lowest latency and response time possible. The following applications can get benefited through using Tier 0 storage:

- Algorithmic trading
- Data modeling
- Trade optimization
- Realtime data/feed processing
- Contextual web advertising
- Other realtime transaction systems
- Currency exchange and arbitrage

Tier “0” storage is most beneficial with random read miss application. If random read miss percentage is low, application will not see any performance difference since writes and sequential reads/writes already leverage Symmetrix cache to achieve the lowest possible response time.

For example, if the read hit percentage is high >90 % as compared to read misses, such application like DSS, Streaming media, improvements provided by Tier 0 storage will not likely be enough to be cost-effective.

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Sr. Solutions Architect; Expertise: - Cloud Design & Architect - Data Center Consolidation - DC/Storage Virtualization - Technology Refresh - Data Migration - SAN Refresh - Data Center Architecture More info:- diwakar@emcstorageinfo.com
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