Easy Tier function

The IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud software includes IBM® Easy Tier®, which is a function that responds to the presence of drives in a storage pool. The system automatically and nondisruptively moves frequently accessed data to high performance MDisks, thus placing such data in a faster tier of storage.

Easy Tier eliminates manual intervention when you assign highly active data on volumes to faster responding storage. In this dynamically tiered environment, data movement is seamless to the host application regardless of the storage tier in which the data belongs. Depending on requirements and budget, you can purchase storage through your supported cloud service provider with different characteristics to act as different tiers of storage. For example, if the storage contains small capacity but high IOPS then it can be used as a performance tier to accelerate I/O operations and control cost.

If a pool contains one type of MDisk, Easy Tier goes into balancing mode. When the pool contains multiple types of MDisks, Easy Tier is automatically turned on.