Data Management Glossary

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FabricPool

What is NetApp FabricPool?

FabricPool is a NetApp storage technology that enables automated tiering of data from an all-flash appliance to low-cost object storage tiers either on or off premises. This technology is a form of storage pools which are collections of storage volumes exported to a shared storage environment.

Read more about storage pools.

Enterprise data storage vendors have had a complicated relationship with data tiering. While some storage vendors continue to make claims about needing no tiers, most data storage vendors now acknowledge that 70%+ of unstructured file data is cold data and provide options for tiering to lower-cost storage. While lower cost drives were initially the target for the cold tier, many vendors now also offer tiering through their file system to object storage on-premises or in the cloud.

Storage-based data tiering and pools-based techniques to move data within a single architecture or operating system can deliver cost savings for system data such as snapshots. However, storage tiering introduces many limitations when it comes to flexible data policies, storage cost savings, ransomware defense, broader data access and unstructured data management needs.

Read the blog post: What you need to know before jumping into the cloud tiering pool