tiered storage within windows server 2008 r2

[talion83]

I do not believe this is possible but....

Within a SAN environment it is possible to setup a tiered storage so that files that need higher IO are on faster drives and those requiring lower, are on slower - yet the appearance to the OS is the same.

Is there a way within Server 2008 R2 to present the same sort of environment to users? I have a new file server that I am in the process of bringing online utilizing DFS.

The current file server is going to remain for archival/backup purposes. What I am wondering is if I can use DFS (or another method) to have files appear in a single folder to users but be spread across the two servers.

For example:
- File X.PDF is over 12 months old and is now residing on the Archive Server
- File AXA.PDF was created earlier today.
- A user goes into the 'Public' Share folder and sees both X.PDF and AXA.PDF - to the user both files appear to be in that location but to the DFS share it knows that X.PDF is located on the Archive server.

I know I can use DFS in this manner for an individual share - the question is if I can take it a step further to within a single share.

 

[imagoon]

NTFS last I checked doesn't have this built in to it. Nearly all solutions I see are block level and thus filesystem type agnostic. You can simulate this at a much poorer method by mounting the faster storage to a directory on the slow storage or vis versa. IE create a share have files in it on the faster disk. Create an "archive" folder and mount the slower disks to that folder. Obviously that is not as clean as block level. This works with NTFS and most of the linux OS's

 

[ForumMaster]

you can do it differently (but i doubt this is what you mean) using solutions such as vmax offered by EMC.

you map the storage. the machine will automatically move it to the correct tier based on the IO needs.