Many organizations are evaluating tiered storage as a way to lower the cost of their storage infrastructure. Moving to storage solutions that use SATA and even iSCSI are a common approach to adding storage tiers. While they may lower the cost relative to primary storage, they don't necessarily make storage easier to manage.

A better approach is to determine which data is dynamic (still changing) and which data is static, either due to its age or to the reference nature of the data. By relocating the static data to a data preservation system like the ProStor InfiniVault, you get the economic benefits of a tiered storage solution without the additional management challenges.

Proper data preservation systems like ProStor InfiniVault use low-cost SATA drives to store the data with a data preservation operating system that stores the data based on business rules and good practices. The data can also be de-duplicated, compressed, encrypted, write protected, authenticated, held immutable, access tracked, and retention managed over a finite period of time. ProStor InfiniVault also enables power to be turned off to data that hasn't been accessed for long periods of time yet still make the data available to any application that may have the rights to access it in the future. Copies of the data also need to be made so that the data is protected and can be sent to another offsite location.