Easy Tier function

Lenovo Storage V7000 includes Easy Tier ^®, a function that responds to the presence of drives in a storage pool that also contains hard disk drives (HDDs). The system automatically and nondisruptively moves frequently accessed data from HDD MDisks to flash drive 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. Manual controls exist so that you can change the default behavior, for example, such as turning off Easy Tier on pools that have any combinations of the three types of MDisks.

The system supports these tiers:

Flash tier: The flash tier exists when flash MDisks are in the pool. The flash MDisks provide greater performance than enterprise or nearline MDisks.
Enterprise tier: The enterprise tier exists when enterprise-class MDisks are in the pool, such as those built from Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives.
Nearline tier: The nearline tier exists when nearline-class MDisks are used in the pool, such as those drives built from nearline SAS drives.

All MDisks belong to one of the tiers, which includes MDisks that are not yet part of a pool.

If a pool contains a single type of MDisk, Easy Tier goes into balancing mode. When the pool contains multiple types of MDisks, Easy Tier is automatically turned on. The local Mdisks are classified as Flash, Enterprise, or Nearline.