Tiered storage consists of affordable RAID systems and storage network solutions which accommodate a mix of high-performance SAS (serial-attached SCSI), SSD (Solid State Disk), and low-cost SATA drives. With the latest SATA-II backplane technology running at 3Gb (300MB/sec), the latest RAID systems are able to utilize a mix of drive types in the same compatible drive slots... offering unprecidented flexibility in tailoring the mix of drive-types to the mission at hand, at a breakthrough price-point. Users can, for the first time, easily adjust system performance as requirements change or new servers are added in small, inexpensive RAID systems and not just with the most expensive, large-scale enterprise RAID arrays.
SSD resources are sharable, unlike server-resident SSD cards. You may partition the SSD resources into hundreds of partitions, each of which may be allocated to one or more servers via iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage network connections. And SSD is VMWare compatible, unlike internal SSD cards, so you can implement a virtualized server environment with every virtual server able to access it's own zero-latency disk resource as easily as any local disk drive.
Feel free to download and evaluate Seagate's latest white paper, presenting an informative look into some of the new SAS and SATA-II technical capabilities now possible with tiered storage solutions... such as mixing high-performance database and web portal systems with file servers, mixing primary and near-line storage, or mixing production servers and disk-to-disk backup systems in the same affordable storage arrays.
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