HPE XP7 Smart Tiers improves storage performance and controls costs by transparently migrating data to appropriate tiers of storage within the HPE XP7 Storage. Smart Tiers manages data in thin provisioning pools. It monitors performance at the page level and can migrate data online to a different tier, automatically or manually, based on policies. Smart Tiers supports up to three tiers per pool. Smart Tiers supports external storage, which allows users to setup inexpensive external storage as one of the storage tiers for infrequently accessed data. RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6 are supported.

Real Time Tiering: Smart Tier further enhances its tiering capability through real time tiering enhancement. Apart from period based tiering ranging from 30 minutes to 24 hour cycle, with real time tiering, the cycle time is reduced to seconds and sub-seconds level providing rapid response to workload changes. This is specifically beneficial for applications which experience a sudden surge in usage and require the Smart Tier monitor cycle to be less than 30 minutes to respond rapidly to the sudden increase in application usage.