It’s conventional to talk about numbered tiers when discussing storage technology: Tier 1 is the best-performing but also the most expensive. If you’re trying to choose the most suitable storage for a particular platform, however, it may be helpful to stop using the numbers.
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NetApp ANZ principle technologist John Martin made this point at the Elevate customer event earlier this week. “We should stop using ordinal numbers when we’re talking about tiers,” he said. “The problem is by default, we always want the best.” Yet that doesn’t mean the performance gets used; utilisation in Tier 1 systems is often under 12 per cent, Martin said.
As we noted last week, choosing faster performance for its own sake isn’t always sensible. Eliminating the numeric labelling means considering the actual merits and costs of each option. “Why not call it tier pink or tier blue?” Martin suggested.
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One response to “Stop Numbering Tiers To Make Better Storage Decisions”
This seems pointless. His point seems to be “you might as well just call them whatever and assign that a meaning”… Which is basically identical to how it is now, we order them by something random and then assign that meaning. In this case, it also gives additional information about the hardwares CAPABILITIES not it’s UTILIZATION.