Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Management and Migration > Storage Tiering with Dell PowerScale SmartPools > Storage pools
Storage pools enable subsets of hardware to be defined within a single cluster. This ability allows file layout to be aligned with specific sets of nodes through the configuration of storage pool policies. The notion of storage pools is an abstraction that encompasses disk pools, node pools, and tiers, all described in the following sections.