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The CloudTier Storage Tiering SDK is a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) file system filter driver development kit. It is a data storage technique that automatically moves data between high-cost and low-cost storage media. It allows you to free up on-premise storage capacity transparently, by moving out cooler data to the cloud storage, thereby reducing capital and operational expenditures. The CloudTier Storage Tiering SDK provides you a simple and low-cost solution to integrate your on-premise storage to cloud storage infrastructure in a seamless, secure, and transparent fashion. There is no interruption to migrate your on-premise files to the remote cloud storage, so you don't need to change your existing applications and infrastructure. It uses the on-premises storage as a tier 0 storage (hot storage), uses the public cloud storage as a tier 1 storage (clod storage). So you can connect the cloud storage as a second tier. Your application can use the cloud storage just like the local storage without any changes. The storage tiering is a comprehensive technology to access the remote storage transparently. The CloudTier storage SDK integrates with the local file system. When an application accesses a stub file, the CloudTier Filter Driver will bring back the remote storage’s data back to the application or rehydrate the stub file as a normal physical file based on the recall policy. A stub file looks and acts like a regular file, it has the same file attributes with the original physical file (file size, creation time, last write time, last access time), it also keeps the original file’s security. A stub file is a file with sparse file and reparse point attributes, your customized tag data can be embedded to the stub file. A stub file doesn’t take the storage space for the file data, it only keeps the meta data of the file.