Storage Tier Create
In QuantaStor, the "Create Storage Tier" feature allows you to define groups of Storage Pools with similar properties. For example, within a storage grid you may have several all-flash pools that are ideal for databases and VMs and several lower cost storage pools which are ideal for backup and archive workloads.
With Storage Provisioning Tiers those pools can be grouped together into a "Gold" provisioning tier for the all-flash storage and a "Silver" provisioning tier for the lower cost archive storage. Once created all CLI/API commands which require a Storage Pool ID can be called using the ID of a Storage Provisioning Tier rather than a specific Storage Pool.
The system will automatically choose the pool with the most free-space and will also take into account over-provisioning so that a fairly even balance can be achieved across pools.
The purpose of this feature is to make it easier for automated systems to provision storage from a QuantaStor storage grid without having to do complex analysis of the various pools in order to get a good match to a given workload's use case. Further, tiers can also contain location information so that the storage can be provisioned from systems local to the workload. For example, say your organization has a east-campus and a west-campus and a given workload requires high IOPS for a database. It could provision from a tier named "east-campus-gold-tier" and QuantaStor will automatically determine which pool is the ideal one to provision from given the group of pools within the Storage Provisioning Tier "east-campus-gold-tier". Similarly a user on west-campus needing archive storage could provision from "west-campus-silver-tier" to get low cost storage allocated for backups.
Navigation: Storage Management --> Storage Pools --> (Pool icon) --> Create Storage Tier... (rightclick)