One example of using tiered storage would be in a customer order center:
The original order and associated shipping and tracking information should be stored in a high-performance, highly available OLTP database on “tier 1” storage. The data should stay there until the order is fulfilled.
After the order is fulfilled, the shipping data can be discarded.
The ordering information must be retained while the warranty is still valid. However, it can be stored in a lower-performance database on “tier 2” storage. After the warranty has expired, the data can be expired and taken offline.
In this example, you might not need special storage management applications to move the data around—the data migration might be accomplished with database scripts. This reinforces the point that ILM is a methodology, not a technology.