IBM FlashSystem 900 allows clients to run their analyses and predictions at a new level of speed, which helps companies to go to market faster. It is not only a powerful processor, but the speed of access to big data plays a significant role in OLAP applications. 

The IBM FlashSystem 900 with MicroLatency and extreme performance provides a new competitive advantage to clients. 

## 11.2 Tiering 

A tiering approach,  as used in the IBM SAN Volume Controller feature Easy Tier, is a solution that combines the business aspect of taking the most out of your investment and functionalities that can add value to other storage with the highly advanced key points that the IBM FlashSystem 900 can offer, such as IBM MicroLatency and maximum performance. 

The great advantage of the tiering approach is the capability to automatically move the most frequently accessed data to the highest performing storage system. In this case, the IBM FlashSystem 900 is the highest performing storage. The less frequently accessed data can be moved to slower performing storage, which can be solid-state drive (SSD) based storage or disk-based storage. The data movement that can be done at block or file level is described next. 

Important:  Consider that IBM Easy Tier latency with IBM FlashSystem 900is much lower than most of the high-end storage devices on the market. 

When IBM Easy Tier is used on volumes with IBM SAN Volume Controller level compression, only read activity is optimized for its latency. Because volumes are always compressed at FlashSystem level, such volumes should not be compressed at IBM SAN Volume Controller level. This configuration ensures the full capabilities of Easy Tier to optimize read and write activities (of block sizes < 64 KB). 

## 11.2.1 IBM Easy Tier or block-level tiering 

IBM Easy Tier is IBM’s implementation of block tiering . Other vendors use other names for the block movement between different tiers of storage. In this section, we do not describe how tiering works. The main objective is to explain how to take advantage of this implementation by using the IBM FlashSystem 900, and to describe which use case best fits this solution. 

Some tiering solutions do not offer the possibility of external tiering . No external tiering means that the block movement can be done only inside the storage device. Because this approach is limited and does not work with the FlashSystem 900, only external tiering is described here. 

The IBM solution for external tier, which is known as IBM Easy Tier , is in IBM SAN Volume Controller, the IBM Storwize V5030 and V7000 models, and the FlashSystem 9100, all of which can be put in front of an IBM FlashSystem 900 and integrated into its virtualization. IBM SAN Volume Controller offers excellent synergy and the most I/O power with the IBM FlashSystem 900. 

