Qtier™ Drives Auto-Tiering
Constantly optimize data across storage tiers
Qtier Automatically Tiers Hot and Cold Data
Qtier™ is an automated-tiering storage solution that automatically moves hot data to high-performance drives and cold data to lower-cost, higher-capacity drives, allowing businesses to enjoy exceptional application performance and lower storage TCO simultaneously.
More Cost-Effective
Demand for high-performance storage has increased as solid-state drives (SSD) prices have steadily declined over recent years. SSDs offer high IOPS and low response times, which can benefit data center applications that require fast and consistent performance. However, the cost per gigabyte of an SSD is still higher than a conventional hard drive (HDD), making HDDs more economical for applications that store large amounts of infrequently-accessed (cold) data.
Qtier automatically moves active data to high-performance drives, achieving high performance and cost benefits by alleviating administrator responsibilities in tasks such as storage performance evaluations, layout design, and relocation of data.
Benefits of Using Qtier
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Optimal storage efficiency
Continuous data optimization across high-performance SSDs, SAS drives, and high-capacity SATA HDDs based on access frequency.
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High performance
Improves overall system performance as active data is moved to faster storage tiers for current tasks.
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Cost saving
Businesses can buy fewer SSDs, saving money on expensive flash storage.
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Easy to set up
Create a Qtier pool, add tiered RAID groups, then configure a tiering schedule easily with Storage & Snapshots.
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Schedule
Run auto-tiering during off-peak times, such as weekends or evenings for optimal system performance during busy work hours.
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Performance analysis
Check auto-tiering statistics and history to accurately evaluate auto-tiering policies.
Smart Tiering with Flexible Management
You can enable Qtier in Storage & Snapshots during storage pool creation, or upgrade an existing storage pool to use Qtier at any time.
You can easily switch SSDs from SSD Cache Acceleration to Qtier without taking the NAS offline. Simply disable the SSD cache, remove the SSDs from the cache, then add them to a Qtier storage pool to deliver boosted performance and more storage space.
Qtier Highlights
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Automatic Learning
Qtier 2.0 intelligently analyzes storage pools read and write I/O to determine the best time and optimum transfer speeds for automatic-tiering. This helps deliver optimal storage efficiency through daily learning.
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Qtier On-Demand
You can configure Qtier when creating a storage pool, or later for an existing pool. You can flexibly install SSDs, a QM2 PCIe card, or connect expansion units to the NAS, then add a new storage tier with Storage & Snapshots.
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Higher Performance with I/O-Aware Qtier
Qtier reserves a cache-like space in the SSD tiered to handle burst I/O in real time. This reserved space allows Qtier to continue to process IOPS-intensive applications even when SSD tier space is low, guaranteeing consistent storage performance.
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Flexibly Change SSD RAID Configuration and Type
In QTS 4.4.1, you can flexibly change the SSDs in the SSD tier to add or remove SSDs in a RAID group, change a group’s RAID type, or change the SSD type (SATA, M.2, QM2).
Enable Qtier on QNAP NAS
Three Levels of Tiered Storage
Qtier offers 3 storage tiers for different drives: ultra-high speed tier (SSD), high speed tier (SAS), and high capacity tier (SATA/NL-SAS).
Visualized Statistics for Performance Analysis
Historical data assists users in performance tuning and storage provisioning, enabling accurate adjustment of auto-tiering policies.
Improve Auto-Tiering Efficiency with User-Defined Policies
Policy-defined auto-tiering enables dynamic reallocation of data based on the data or application performance requirements, and also scheduling and prioritization of data migration.
Flexibly Remove or Change SSDs
You can flexibly change the SSDs in the SSD tier to add or remove SSDs in a RAID group, change a group’s RAID type, or change the SSD type (SATA, M.2, QM2).
Qtier with SSD Cache for 24/7 Acceleration
Qtier supports concurrent tiering and SSD caching. In this mode, Qtier constantly monitors I/O activity and keeps active data that requires minor mostly random read/write operations in SSD read-only or read-write cache, and other data in the tiered storage, while automatically moving data between tiers.
| Qtier | Full SSD | SSD cache | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $ | $$ | $ |
| Storage space | Big | Small | Big |
| Available SSD space | Expands as needed | Expands as needed | Limited by available memory |
| Data migration method | Scheduled | No | Automatic |
| Data migration mechanism | Moves data based on access frequency | Moves all data to SSD storage | Replicates frequently accessed data to SSD storage |
| Application scenarios | Predictable I/O workloads, such as file, web, e-mail servers and virtualization application or video editing. | Fast and intensive I/O applications, such as databases or virtualized environments. | High frequency data access environments, such as virtualized applications or high-resolution video or audio processing. |
QNAP x86-based NAS (Intel or AMD) or 64-bit ARM-based NAS with 2GB RAM and QTS 4.4.1 (or later), please refer to the specifications of each model for more supporting details.
