Continuously growing data volume increases our customers' need for more storage capacity and the possibility to store data as cost-effectively as possible. To fulfil this requirement, stepping stone AG expanded the storage capacity of stoney cloud and simultaneously extended the storage architecture with a cost-saving mass storage.

With these extensions, stepping stone AG offers performance- and cost-appropriate storage options for various application areas.

The storage architecture of the stoney cloud infrastructure is tiered and thus offers the possibility of assigning different categories of data to different types of storage media. A storage tier is determined by the performance and cost of the storage media. The stoney cloud storage infrastructure consists of 3 tiers:

• Tier-1 (NVMe SSD) is exclusively equipped with high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs). This all-flash storage uses Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) as interface for data exchange. This NVMe SSD-based tier is designed for applications relying on very high speed, such as databases or time-critical business applications.
• Tier-2 (SATA SSD) is using solid-state drives (SSDs) as well. This all-flash storage operates with the slightly slower Serial AT Attachment (SATA) type interface for data exchange. This SATA SSD-based tier is suitable for operating systems or business applications relying on high speed.
• The new Tier-3 (SATA HDD) is built with Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and uses Serial AT Attachment (SATA) for data exchange. As the most cost-effective variant, this tier is therefore suitable as mass storage for large amounts of data with less high speed requirements such as pictures, videos or data backups.

All tiers can be combined as desired within a virtual machine. Thus, the operating system can use a Tier-2 (SATA SSD) disk, the database a Tier-1 (NVMe SSD) disk and the images linked in the database a Tier-3 (SATA HDD) disk.