In today’s data-driven world, organizations are accumulating massive amounts of digital information. Traditionally, managing this data has relied heavily on tiered storage hardware—a system that assigns data to different storage types based on performance, cost, and access frequency. However, with advancements in software solutions, particularly in file system-level archiving, businesses are beginning to question whether hardware-centric tiering is still necessary.
One emerging player in this space is MLTek’s file archiver, a tool designed to optimize data management by intelligently archiving infrequently accessed files without altering the user experience. Could solutions like this spell the end of tiered storage hardware?
Understanding Tiered Storage and Its Limitations
Tiered storage involves using multiple types of storage media—high-speed SSDs, slower HDDs, and even tape backups—to manage data cost-effectively. Active data resides on fast, expensive storage, while colder data is moved to cheaper, slower storage tiers.
While tiered storage helps manage costs, it comes with challenges:
- Complexity: Managing multiple hardware layers requires advanced IT infrastructure and oversight.
- Cost: Maintaining different types of storage hardware increases operational and capital expenditures.
- Inflexibility: Data movement between tiers can lead to latency issues and complicate access policies.
This is where MLTek’s file archiver presents a compelling alternative by shifting the archiving function from the hardware level to the file system level.
How File System-Level Archiving Works
File system-level archiving is implemented through software, whereas hardware tiering is done through devices. MLTek’s file archiver, for instance, is a tool that enables archiving through monitoring file access patterns of the users and automatically transferring cold data to secondary storage(media, such as network shares or cloud storage), and file stubs with files as their predecessor together with the shortcuts.
The stubs are the same as the originals for the users and applications as they carry the same appearance and action. The system will simply retrieve the archived file when the user tries to access it, therefore making the retrieval process not visible to the user and without disruption.
The MLTek’s file archiver works with the file system so that there is no need for any other hardware besides it. It thus uses the infrastructure already available in a more efficient way.
Benefits of MLTek’s File Archiver over Hardware Tiering
The utilization of a software application-oriented archiving solution that is based on the cloud instead of a hardware tiering system has many advantages:
- Cost Reduction: Organizations do not have to invest in costly hardware storage for every storage tier. Archives of files can be stored in NAS devices and cloud storage with cheap costs.
- Simplicity: The file system is only attached to the archiving software, hence IT is no longer a complex task. No need for complex policies or physical storage migration scripts.
- Scalability: The cloud integration and storage flexibility make it much easier to scale MLTek’s file archiver than upgrading hardware.
- Performance Optimization: The most frequently accessed files are located on high-performance storage, the older ones are taken off without affecting the speed of the system and performance.
- Compliance and Auditing: Archiving software sometimes also includes logging and access controls that help companies meet their regulatory and compliance requirements barring the need for extra hardware.
Real-World Use Cases and Applications
The healthcare, legal, and media industries typically operate with large amounts of files that must be kept for many years but are infrequently used. In such situations, MLTek’s file archiver can easily decrease the costs of storage while providing access.
For example, a medical institution utilizing MLTek’s file archiver can transfer all pictures of patients that are older than 5 years to a secondary storage system from the main server that is used to store the other medical images. These files are still always at the clinicians’ disposal, but now they are no longer consuming the costly high-speed storage.
Also, law firms and engineering companies that have vast documentation archives can experience a positive result from the simpler data management, see improvement in the storage performance and reduced backup times.
Can File Archiving Fully Replace Tiered Storage?
The very short answer is yes for many user cases. Tiered operations are used mainly in ultra-high performance environments like H300 with real-time data analytics. For most typical businesses, though, with normal file access patterns, MLTek’s file archiver offers an extremely good alternative. Its advantages are that it stays inside the file system, keeps file paths and metadata, and enables the user to easily get the archived content which is available in almost every industry. The movement of cloud storage to being cheaper and more reliable means that this type of software-oriented approach will become standard.
Conclusion
Although tiered storage hardware has always been a mainstay in data management, it is increasingly being replaced by more efficient, cost-effective, and flexible software solutions. MLTek is a file archiver that ensures successful transitions in this aspect of data management and introduces a new smarter, more efficient way of handling files without the physical storage layers being so costly and complicated. In pursuing the goal of becoming as cost-effective and efficient as possible, many businesses have considered utilizing MLTek’s File Archiver as a solution for file system-level archiving that, in turn, would make tiered storage hardware fully irrelevant in the near future.
