Storage tiers

In Acronis Cyber Infrastructure terminology, tiers are disk groups that allow you to organize storage workloads based on your criteria. For example, you can use tiers to separate workloads produced by different tenants. Or you can have a tier of fast SSDs for service or virtual environment workloads and a tier of high-capacity HDDs for backup storage.

When assigning disks to tiers (which you can do at any time), have in mind that faster storage drives should be assigned to higher tiers. For example, you can use tier 0 for backups and other cold data (CS without SSD cache); tier 1 for virtual environments—a lot of cold data but fast random writes (CS with SSD cache); and tier 2 for hot data (CS on SSD), caches, specific disks, and such.

This recommendation is related to how Acronis Cyber Infrastructure works with storage space. If a storage tier runs out of free space, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure will attempt to temporarily use the space of the lower tiers down to the lowest. If the lowest tier also becomes full, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure will attempt to use a higher one. If you add more storage to the original tier later, the data, temporarily stored elsewhere, will be moved to the tier where it should have been stored originally. For example, if you try to write data to tier 2 and it is full, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure will attempt to write that data to tier 1, then to tier 0. If you add more storage to tier 2 later, the aforementioned data, now stored on the tier 1 or 0, will be moved back to tier 2, where it was meant to be stored originally.

Inter-tier data allocation, as well as the transfer of data to the original tier, occurs in the background. You can disable automatic data migration between tiers with the vstorage -c <cluster_name> set-config mds.alloc.strict_tier=1 command.