Stonchus plans to extend tiered storage benefits to his e-mail archive application by the end of the year. But he also needs his systems and business analysts to understand tiered storage technologies so they can better utilize tiered storage for their applications. "I can't make ILM [information life-cycle management] a reality all by myself," Stonchus says.

Yet another problem that users encounter is the architecture and maturity of products that manage the movement of data between tiers of storage. Ruth Mitchell, a storage administrator at a university in upstate New York, used to move files between different tiers of back-end storage using the Hierarchical Storage Management feature in IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager for what had been an all-AIX environment. When the university switched to Windows a few years ago, IBM did not have native Windows support, and Mitchell could not find a third-party product mature enough for her shop.

To deal with the hurdles mentioned above, new classification and virtualization products are emerging that allow users to get the full benefits of tiered storage deployments. Scentric Inc., in Alpharetta, Ga., sells a product called Destiny that allows users to discover, classify and move data on Windows servers and CIFS-compliant network-attached storage (NAS) appliances without the use of agents.

George Rodriguez, an IT manager at ABC Distributing LLC in North Miami, Fla., recently introduced tiered storage into his shop after using Scentric's Destiny data classification tool to help the savings from ILM materialize.

Prior to using Destiny, Rodriguez was constantly allocating more Tier 1 storage on his high-end IBM Shark array to deal with the data growth on his Windows servers. "I had the IBM Shark divided between mainframe and Windows but had to occasionally empty IBM Shark LCUs [logical control units] assigned to the mainframe so I could re-assign them to my Windows servers," Rodriguez says.