HPE Data Management Framework: Making storage bigger on the inside
How do you handle ever-increasing amounts of data without additional capacity drives? Make your storage bigger on the inside with the HPE Data Management Framework (DMF).
If you know the TV series Doctor Who, you’ll recognize the running comedic line: “It’s bigger on the inside!” This line is typically uttered by a first-time visitor to the TARDIS, the space-time vehicle used by the Doctor. Thanks to the space-bending capabilities of the Time Lords, the interior of what appears to be a large blue police box (like the kind you see in the U.K.) on the outside has multiple levels of space on the inside, including a swimming pool. Unfortunately, such technology doesn’t exist for storage use. So you have no choice but to buy additional capacity drives to accommodate the ever-rising tide of data. This strategy soon collapses under its own weight. Budgets are limited, and even with 200-to-300% over-provisioning, capacity may be insufficient. And with increased capacity, other factors must be considered: How can storage performance be maintained? How can even more data be backed up in the same time window? How can OPEX be controlled?
The solution is data management. Adding capacity without data management is like enlarging an airport without a control tower. Additional runaways may allow more planes to take off and land at the same time, but without a control tower, additional runways just increase the chances for an accident. (A TARDIS doesn’t need a runway, it just disappears.)
The HPE Data Management Framework (DMF) is the control tower for data. Built around an awareness that data is stateful (that is, depending on performance and access requirements), DMF provides for the active movement of data between those states to allow full utilization of storage resources. Consider this analogy: When planes land at an airport, they may be cleaned and prepared and take off immediately again. Or they may be put in the hangar, and prepared and maintained for their next flight at a later date. Similarly, data may be in an active “hot” state, seeing immediate usage, or it could be in a “warm” state with fairly frequent usage or in a “cold” state when it is stored in archive. Like the plane, data may change states depending on the circumstances, and should be stored on the appropriate storage infrastructure for its state. “Hot” data is stored on SSDs because it needs the quickest access, it shouldn’t be stored on tapes.
DMF provides intelligent tiering of data through a built-in rules-oriented policy engine. Administrators can create logical tiers of storage based on storage characteristics. That is, a “hot” tier is composed of flash memory and intended for data requiring immediate use, near-line hard drives are used for “warm” tiers, where access is required, but performance requirements are not as stringent, and tape is used as an archive tier for cold data, which doesn’t need immediate access.
