Data migration algorithms in heterogeneous storage systems: A comparative performance evaluation

Abstract

In large scale storage systems such as data centers, data layouts need to be reconfigured over time for load balancing or in the event of system failure/upgrades. The data-migration problem pertains to computing an efficient plan to migrate data to their target locations. Most of the previous results on data-migration assume that storage devices have similar capabilities and can perform only one data transfer at a time. In this paper, we consider the heterogeneous data-migration problem where we associate a transfer constraint to each of the storage nodes, representing the number of simultaneous transfers that each of the nodes can handle. We introduce new data-migration algorithms for the heterogeneous case and perform an empirical comparative study of the performance of these algorithms against algorithms from [1] and [2].