IBM FlashSystem 900 allows clients to run their analyses and predictions at a new level of  speed, which helps companies to go to market faster. It is not only a powerful processor, but  the speed of access to big data plays a significant role in OLAP applications. The IBM FlashSystem 900 with MicroLatency and extreme performance provides a new  competitive advantage to clients. A  tiering approach,  as used in the IBM SAN Volume Controller feature Easy Tier, is a solution  that combines the business aspect of taking the most out of your investment and  functionalities that can add value to other storage with the highly advanced key points that the  IBM FlashSystem 900 can offer, such as IBM MicroLatency and maximum performance. The great advantage of the tiering approach is the capability to automatically move the  most frequently accessed data to the highest performing storage system. In this case, the  IBM FlashSystem 900 is the highest performing storage. The less frequently accessed data  can be moved to slower performing storage, which can be solid-state drive (SSD) based  storage or disk-based storage. The data movement that can be done at block or file level is  described next. Important:  Consider that IBM Easy Tier latency with IBM FlashSystem 900is much lower  than most of the high-end storage devices on the market. When IBM Easy Tier is used on volumes with IBM SAN Volume Controller level  compression, only read activity is optimized for its latency. Because volumes are always  compressed at FlashSystem level, such volumes should not be compressed at IBM SAN  Volume Controller level. This configuration ensures the full capabilities of Easy Tier to  optimize read and write activities (of block sizes < 64 KB). IBM Easy Tier is IBM’s implementation of  block tiering . Other vendors use other names for  the block movement between different tiers of storage. In this section, we do not describe how  tiering works. The main objective is to explain how to take advantage of this implementation  by using the IBM FlashSystem 900, and to describe which use case best fits this solution. Some tiering solutions do not offer the possibility of  external tiering . No external tiering  means that the block movement can be done only inside the storage device. Because this  approach is limited and does not work with the FlashSystem 900, only external tiering  is described here. The IBM solution for external tier, which is known as  IBM Easy Tier , is in IBM SAN Volume  Controller, the IBM Storwize V5030 and V7000 models, and the FlashSystem 9100, all of  which can be put in front of an IBM FlashSystem 900 and integrated into its virtualization. IBM  SAN Volume Controller offers excellent synergy and the most I/O power with the IBM  FlashSystem 900. Chapter 11. Use cases and solutions  399 11.2.1 IBM Easy Tier or block-level tiering 11.2 Tiering