Automated Storage Tiering

[andrea.caldarone]

Hello,

I'm in charge of evaluating StarWind VSAN for my company. Automated Storage Tiering (like FAST of EMC2) is one prerequisites.
I've not understood (my fault, I'm newbie on StarWind) if StarWind VSAN does automated tiering (not L2 cache which is different).
If StarWind has not tiering I could leverage on WIndows Storage Spaces but, again, I ask you if this configuration is supported/reccomended.

Thank you.

[Oles (staff)]

As we are Windows native, thus we do recommend and support using Windows Storage Spaces to configure the tiering and then put our flat image on top of it
We also are developing and testing our own StarWind tearing now, so should have that one released some time soon.

[oscaru]

Hello Oles,

I am in the same situation as andrea.caldarone . Currently evaluating Starwind Vsan.

Why flat image on top of Storage Spaces? Why not LSFS?

I've asked the same question on another thread but haven't received your comments yet.

[Michael (staff)]

Hello!
LSFS was designed for specific environments with lots of random writes and it works best on big slow spindle-based parity RAID arrays.
Assuming that tiered Storage Spaces is fast enough, I believe image file is the best choice for it.
Here’s a blog post from Anton where he goes into details about it:
https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/a-sho ... call-lsfs/

[oscaru]

Thanks for the reply

Great read, and that was the response I was looking.

I'll use flat image then over this tiered storage space.

[Michael (staff)]

We are always happy to help you