A new thought paradigm: delivering cost effective and ubiquitously accessible storage with enterprise backup system via a multi-tiered storage framework

Multimedia applications are characterized by their demand for high performance storage and computationally intensive functions. Ringling College of Art and Design is at the forefront of addressing challenges inherent to multimedia applications. In spite of using state of the art storage systems, we realize the need to raise our storage systems to a new level. This new level is based on the facts that the more data is managed centrally, the more economically and highly leveraged it becomes. Moreover, storage consolidation drives other consolidation such as servers and backup systems. To raise our storage to the next level, we have developed and deployed an innovative three tiered storage framework and an enterprise backup system. Our framework takes advantage of our observation that active user data clusters are considerably smaller than the total user data clusters. Our three tiered storage system consists of the highest performance storage; good performance storage; and the highest capacity, lowest cost per unit storage seamlessly integrated to function as one system. From the user's perspective, this system appears to use traditional file system structure and operations. In this report, we will present our framework, implementation details, issues and challenges, lessons learned, and the results we achieved.