In today’s data driven world where businesses generate and store massive amounts of information.
This data varies from customer records, transaction logs to multimedia files such as videos, images, etc. with this exponential data growth, this poses a crucial challenge for businesses, i.e. how to storage, manage and access data efficiently without breaking the bank?
Traditional storage solutions often force businesses to choose between performance and cost. High performance storage solutions are available but cost a lot, while cost affective storage solution may sacrifice quick access.
Object storage solves this by offering scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient storage. But to unlock its power, you need tiering a method to automatically or manually move data to the most cost-effective storage tier based on usage.
In this article, we’ll break down what object storage is, how tiering works, and how businesses can save significantly without compromising performance.
What is Object Storage and Why Your Business Needs It?
Object storage is a flat storage architecture that stores data as objects, not files or blocks. Each object includes the data, metadata, and a unique identifier.
Why does your business needs object storage?
- Scalability: handles massive amounts of unstructured data making it perfect for ever-growing workloads
- Cost effectiveness: reducing storage costs, especially for cloud based applications and archival needs
- Durability and reliability: with built in replication and redundancy, it ensures data integrity
- Seamless Accessibility: since object storage can be API driven, it enables fast access across distributed locations
How Businesses Use Object Storage?
Object storage is incredibly versatile. Here are common use cases:
- AI/ML Workload: object storage is used to store large datasets due to its virtually unlimited storage capacity
- Backup and Archival: storing backups and data that needs to be archived in object storage as it provides long term and cost effective data retention
- CDNs and Media Streaming: as accessibility of data is flexible and fast, it is used to delivery digital content efficiently
What is Tiering in Object Storage?
Tiering is a smart strategy to organize data based on how frequently it’s accessed. Instead of keeping all data in expensive, high-speed storage, tiering places data in performance-based levels:
- Hot storage: For frequently accessed data.
- Warm storage: For occasionally accessed files.
- Cold storage: For rarely accessed, archival data.
Storage Tier Comparison Table
| Tier Type | Access Frequency | Performance | Cost | Use Cases |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | Frequent | High | High | AI/ML, databases |
| Warm | Occasional | Moderate | Medium | Backups, logs |
| Cold | Rare | Low | Low | Archives, compliance |
By implementing tiering, businesses can significantly cut storage costs while keeping critical data readily available the perfect balance of performance and efficiency.
Why Do We Need Tiering?
Cloud storage can be expensive, and not all data needs the same level of performance. Tiering helps businesses strike the perfect balance between cost, speed and efficiency; here are some features why it’s essential:
- Cost savings: we can move less critical data to lower cost storage, reducing unnecessary expenses
- Performance optimization: we keep high priority workloads running smoothly by reserving fast storage for frequently accessed data
- Compliance data archives: we can ensure regulatory compliance by storing data for longer periods of time without overspending
- Scalability and future proofing: your business can adapt to growing data needs without an exponential rise in costs
With tiering, business pay only for the performance they actually need, making storage smarter and future ready.
What Are The Types of Tiering in Object Storage?
Efficient storage tiering ensures that data is placed in the most cost effective and performance optimized location. Let’s look at different tiers for object storage:
Hot Storage (e.g. SSDs)
They are ultra fast storage for frequently accessed and latency free data. They are ideal for real time applications, databases and AI/ML workloads
Warm Storage (e.g. HDDs)
They are more affordable than SSDs and this tier is suitable for moderately accessed data, such as logs, backups or archived documents.
Cold Storage (e.g. magnetic tapes)
It can also be referred to as archival storage. It is lowest cost tier for long term retention which can be used for rarely accessed data, such as logs, backups or archived business documents
Different businesses have different storage needs. There are various tiering strategies which vary based on how data is managed and moved across storage tiers, which are as follows:
Manual Tiering
Users manually move data between storage classes based on changing requirements, it is labor intensive but offers full control.
Policy Based (automated) Tiering
We have some predefined rules which automatically shift data between tiers based on access frequency, age or priority, which minimizes our manual effort.
Also Read: Block Storage Vs Object Storage – What’s The Difference?
How can you use tiering to optimize your business costs? a detailed example
We can understand this better using a real world scenario of a media company which stores high resolution videos.
A media company which generates terabytes of high resolution video content daily, storing everything in high performance storage would be too expensive. So, tiering helps optimize costs while maintaining access to critical data.
- Newly uploaded videos and trending content, frequently accessed by users, stored in high speed SSDs for seamless playback (Hot tier)
- Older but still relevant content that gets occasional views moves to more affordable HDD based storage (Warm tier)
- Archival footage for compliance, legal purpose or historical reference is stored in low cost archival storage (Cold tier)
There are many other real world use cases where tiering in object storage will reduce business costs by a great margin without sacrificing performance, such as E-commerce, AI/ML companies, SaaS businesses, etc.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between object storage and block storage?
How does tiering in object storage reduce costs?
Which cloud providers offer storage tiering?
When should a business implement storage tiering?
Is object storage good for databases?
Is tiering secure and compliant?
Conclusion
Tiering in object storage is a powerful way to cut storage costs without compromising performance. By assigning data to the right tier hot, warm, or cold you ensure optimal speed, compliance, and cost-efficiency.
Whether you’re a media giant, SaaS provider, or AI startup, storage tiering can future-proof your data infrastructure.
Ready to optimize your storage costs? Let’s talk +91-789-789-0752 how our object storage solutions can help your business scale smartly.
