Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Management and Migration > Storage Tiering with Dell PowerScale SmartPools > Example C: Investment protection for financial market data
An investment firm collects financial market data from multiple global sources around the clock. This real-time data must be captured, stored, and then analyzed to predict micro and macro market trends to justify purchase recommendations.
The data capture, plus subsequent analysis results, generates terabytes of data per day. Real-time capture is free, but if a time period is missed, historical data must be purchased from a service. Hence, performance and reliability are crucial. Most data analyzed is less than 48 hours old, but the data is also retained indefinitely. Such retention allows long-term analysis and review of model accuracy over time to be performed in any review timeframe.
The production environment is demanding, and data life is long. There is a strong preference for scalable, durable systems that combine performance and archive capabilities with a compelling cost of ownership.
In this case, the preferred architecture would typically be a three-tiered SmartPools cluster using L3 cache. New data is ingested onto mid-performance spinning media, analysis is run on high-performance spinning media, possibly with SSDs. Older data that is used only intermittently is moved to slower, cost optimized disk.
The original equipment stays online for many years. moving down the hierarchy as completely capitalized capacity. New drives and new nodes with better price and/or performance characteristics are added above them. This OneFS investment protection approach helps avoid the pain and disruption of frequent hadware replacement.