Tiering is all the rage – we’re hearing it everywhere. Here's one good article on tiering posted just yesterday at SearchStorage.com. IT organizations, driven by rapid data growth and the pressure to drive costs down, are trying to figure out how to build storage pools that are high-performing, scalable, yet cost-effective. And what they’ve realized is that this can be achieved by classifying data according to various attributes, and then housing that data on storage tiers specifically designed for those characteristics. 

But inherent in this architecture is this question: How do you get the right data on the right devices without affecting users, apps, and management processes?

The most immediate solution is to purchase a storage appliance that houses different tiers internally – or at least front-ends them – and as a result creates an abstraction layer that hides the varying tiers. This is exactly what the major storage vendors like EMC want to see happen, as well as lots of startups – Avere, for example. 

But I believe the market will reject this type of solution for a number of different reasons.

1. Vendor Lock-In: Storage technologies are changing rapidly, and competition drives innovation up and costs down. It’s important to have choice, flexibility, and access to the best technology that fits your environment. No one wants to be locked into a single vendor and forced to pay a premium for it, especially when there are so many exciting and inventive products that may provide more value.
2. Every Environment is Unique: You need to be able to design tiered configurations that are optimized to your environment – the size of the various tiers, the proximity of data to the apps and users that use it, the specific replication, backup, and management policies of different types of data, and more. There is simply too much complexity for a one-size-fits-all approach to storage architecture.
3. Single Points-of-Failure in I/O: There is something disconcerting about a hardware solution where every bit of data has to go through a single point-of-failure. Especially if that is the gateway to all the unstructured data in the entire organization. 
4. Expect the Unexpected: You buy hardware expecting it to last around 3-5 years, but no matter how well you plan, it’s impossible to really know what your data needs are going to be during that timeframe. That’s why you architect for flexibility, so you can easily swap in new technologies and be responsive. It’s hard to do that inside a box.

What IT professionals really want is to be able to “see inside the box.” They want the control and flexibility of being able to assemble and architect the hardware components to meet their highly specific needs, and they will need scalable solution to manage that environment so that it presents itself to users and applications as a single pool of storage.

Read more about how AutoVirt helps you build out a tiered storage environment from 3rd-party hardware.