QoS support for end users of I/O-intensive applications using shared storage systems

Abstract

While the performance of compute-bound applications can be effectively guaranteed with techniques such as space sharing or QoS-aware process scheduling, it remains a challenge to meet QoS requirements for end users of I/O-intensive applications using shared storage systems because of the difficulty of differentiating I/O services for different applications with individual quality requirements. Furthermore, it is difficult for end users to accurately specify performance goals to the storage system using I/O-related metrics such as request latency or throughput. As access patterns, request rates, and the system workload change in time, a fixed I/O performance goal, such as bounds on throughput or latency, can be expensive to achieve and may not provide performance guarantees such as bounded program execution time.