Every business is subject to operational cycles that influence work flow. These cycles often have a direct effect on performance and availability requirements. The management class, with storage classes and ACS routines, makes it possible for SMS to respond to these cycles as it manages object storage. Every object in the object storage hierarchy must have an associated management class. (See Figure 1 for a representation of this process.)

Remember to factor into your analysis the frequency of each cycle (such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually).

To fully exploit the management class construct, it is necessary to understand class transitions and storage management cycles. A class transition is a change in an object’s management class or storage class when an event occurs that brings about a change in an object’s service level or management criteria. Class transition criteria are specified in management class definitions. When a recalled object is restored to removable media, and its time on disk has exceeded the MC definition, the object will be processed according to the MC definition in effect.

Example: A management class might specify that 180 days from an object’s creation date, the ACS routines should be invoked to determine if a class transition is needed.