Storage tiering is a technique whereby the file metadata and the frequently-accessed blocks are stored in the highest tier and less-accessed blocks are downgraded to lower, cheaper tiers within a storage pool. This automated storage tiering approach allows the vendor to reduce costs by using smaller, faster tiers while still providing good performance. Storage tiering is often touted as a storage efficiency technique for customers to save on storage costs. But a key thing to remember is that the bulk of the cost of data is not in the storage but in the active management and backups of the data. Storage efficiency impacts the storage cost but not the active data management costs.