Public Compute-as-a-Service clients can reduce costs by managing storage options

Based on EMC’s VNX storage platform, Dimension Data will offer High-Performance, Standard and Economy tiers tailored to fulfill the precise requirements of workloads and data sets. EMC VNX Series is a high-performing unified storage platform that is optimised for virtual applications in the cloud. Built with simplicity in mind, Tiered Storage options can be easily selected and provisioned through a web-based user interface or API, enabling organisations to change the type of storage required for cloud servers on the fly. The new service leverages solid state drives (SSD) to accelerate performance for both the High-Performance and Standard options.

Steve Nola, Cloud Solutions Business Unit CEO at Dimension Data said: “Dimension Data is committed to providing a high performance cloud that is easy to use and customise. Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high performance databases as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long term data retention.”

Clients can select Dimension Data Tiered Storage options based on the performance, availability and cost requirement for each application:
Tier 1 – High-performance: 600 GB 15k Drives (RAID 5)
Use Case: Cloud applications that use online active files, database tables, web and user files
Tier 2 – Standard: 2TB 7200RPM (RAID 5)
Use Case: Cloud applications that use VM/VDI files, online archive videos, photos, backups and snapshots, OS images
Tier 3 – Economy: 3TB 7200RPM (RAID 5)
Use Case: Cloud applications that use offline master backup, disaster recovery, gold copy, archive, long term retention