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Tiering exists to achieve the business objectives out of storage system with minimum overhead.
The primary business objective usually is to avoid or reduce storage expenditure for non-business-critical data, driving the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) lower.
While automated policy-based tiering helps in driving the TCO down, chip designers would like to improve their job runtimes regardless of location of data inside the cluster. Hence, depending on the amount of active vs semi-active vs inactive data, business archive policies, performance requirements, TCO requirements, and so on, effective tiering requires a careful consideration of how to mix node types in the cluster.