At first, data tiering was a tactic used by storage systems to reduce data storage costs. This involved grouping data that was not accessed as often into more affordable, if less effective, storage array choices. Data that has been idle for a year or more, for example, may be moved from an expensive Flash tier to a more affordable SATA disk tier. Even though they are quite costly, SSDs and flash can be categorized as high-performance storage classes. Smaller datasets that are actively used and require the maximum performance are usually stored in Flash.
Cloud data tiering has gained popularity as customers seek alternative options for tiering or archiving data to a public cloud. Public clouds presently offer a mix of object and file storage options. Object storage classes such as Amazon S3 and Azure Blob (Azure Storage) deliver significant cost efficiency and all the benefits of object storage without the complexities of setup and management.