Storage tiering is what makes a multimodal data warehouse economically viable at scale. Instead of keeping all vectors in expensive, always-hot memory (as vector databases do), a warehouse automatically moves infrequently queried data to cheaper storage tiers while keeping it searchable. This mirrors how structured data warehouses tier between compute-optimized and storage-optimized layers.
Lifecycle rules define when collections move between tiers based on query frequency, age, or manual policy. A collection that was hot last month but hasn't been queried in 2 weeks can automatically move to warm, still searchable at ~100ms but 90% cheaper. If query traffic returns, the collection rehydrates to hot automatically.