Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Management and Migration > Storage Tiering with Dell PowerScale SmartPools > Overview
Dell PowerScale SmartPools software enables multiple levels of performance, protection, and storage density to co-exist within the same file system. SmartPools unlocks the ability to aggregate and consolidate a wide range of applications within a single extensible, ubiquitous storage resource pool. This architecture helps provide granular performance optimization, workflow isolation, higher utilization, and independent scalability—all with a single point of management.
SmartPools allows you to define the value of the data within your workflows based on policies, and automatically aligns data to the appropriate price/performance tier over time. Data movement is seamless. With file-level granularity and control through automated policies, manual control, or API interface, you can tune performance and layout, storage tier alignment, and protection settings. All this tuning has minimal impact to your end users.
Storage tiering has a convincing value proposition, namely separating data according to its business value, and aligning it with the appropriate class of storage and levels of performance and protection. Information Lifecycle Management techniques have been around for several years but have typically suffered from inefficiencies. They are complex to install and manage, they involve changes to the file system, they require the use of stub files, and so on.
SmartPools is a next-generation approach to tiering that facilitates the management of heterogeneous clusters. The SmartPools capability is native to the OneFS scale-out file system, which allows for unprecedented flexibility, granularity, and ease of management. SmartPools uses many of the components and attributes of OneFS, including data layout and mobility, protection, performance, scheduling, and impact management.