It’s a hot summer. Don’t forget to pack your cold data
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Jesse Summan
What’s cooler than being cool? Easy: Ice cold. And if you haven’t touched your data in 30 days, consider that data cold. Filling your data center with cold data is like filling your house with last month’s newspapers. We can help you Marie Kondo-ize your data center and tier that data off to lower-cost storage systems on premises or in the cloud. Does that cold data spark joy? No? Move it out. Free up headroom so your high-performance systems can take on more intense workloads and let your flash fulfill its destiny.
What exactly is cold data?
Infrequently accessed data in a performance tier is known as inactive (cold) data. By default, data that is not accessed for 31 days becomes inactive, which is displayed at the aggregate, cluster, and volume levels. Data that was recently created or accessed is generally more important and of higher value because of how fresh it is. It’s often classified as "hot" or "warm" data. This type of data is accessed frequently by various applications and users for processing. After serving its initial purpose of providing meaningful intelligence, this data often needs to be stored for a lengthy period of time in a cold state for any of a number of reasons.
Why should you unload cold data from your high-performance systems?
When it comes to managing your cold data, NetApp recommends the use of FabricPool, which can reduce TCO and capex, enable additional low-latency use cases, and further enable demanding applications to access hot data. This solution reduces the storage footprint and the associated costs of a system’s environment. Active data remains on high-performance SSDs, while inactive data is tiered to low-cost object storage while preserving NetApp® ONTAP® data efficiencies.
NetApp FabricPool is an optimal solution that enables you to improve efficiency and manageability in your storage environments. FabricPool software allows a high-performance storage system to host frequently accessed critical data, while relocating the colder data to a capacity tier storage system.
How can you get started?
Log in to NetApp Active IQ® to check how much cold data your systems have today. NetApp offers FabricPool as a tiering solution, available in ONTAP 9.2 and later. If you have more than 300TB of cold data, NetApp StorageGRID® is an optimal lower-cost storage tier. And if you have less than 300TB, NetApp recommends using the cloud or ONTAP S3 as the preferred solution. Need more information? Contact a NetApp representative.
Jesse Summan
Jesse is a Product Marketing Manager at NetApp, with a focus on marketing AFF and FAS systems across the installed base. His background includes strategy, content, and messaging to help communicate product value, and has collaborated on Protect 7-Mode and Oracle Refresh programs to name a few. Outside of work, he enjoys playing basketball, producing music, and cooking.