With the new OneFS 7.1 Virtual Appliance you can easily simulate a multi-tier cluster, using Isilon SmartPools.
The Appliance is downloadable here: https://download.emc.com/downloads/DL50362_Isilon-OneFS-Virtual-Nodes-7.1.0.0.zip

In my Lab I started with a OneFS 7.1 Cluster consisting of 6 nodes:

By default these nodes are forming a node pool called “iq_vmware”:

In the next step we are going to create two node pools manually:
a three node S200 and a three node X400 pool.

Start a ssh session to the cluster and issue following commands:

isi storagepool nodepools create S200 --lnns 1-3
isi storagepool nodepools create X200 --lnns 4-6

Back in the Web GUI do a refresh and you can see the result:

At this point we only logically grouped the nodes differently. No data is moved!

To actually separate Data you can modify the “Default File Pool Protection Settings”. Change the “Data storage target” from “anywhere” to “X200”.

To immediately apply changes start the “SmartPool” Job via “Cluster Management -> Job Operations”. The “SmartPool” Job will apply the policy change and move the data.

Furthermore you can create for example a SmartPool Policy to set the data storage target to our “fast” S200 node pool based on a path. There are many more filter capabilities you can apply to your cluster to take advantage of SmartPools.