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Efficient management of idleness in storage systems

Published: 12 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Various activities that intend to enhance performance, reliability, and availability of storage systems are scheduled with low priority and served during idle times. Under such conditions, idleness becomes a valuable “resource” that needs to be efficiently managed. A common approach in system design is to be nonwork conserving by “idle waiting”, that is, delay the scheduling of background jobs to avoid slowing down upcoming foreground tasks.
In this article, we complement “idle waiting” with the “estimation” of background work to be served in every idle interval to effectively manage the trade-off between the performance of foreground and background tasks. As a result, the storage system is better utilized without compromising foreground performance. Our analysis shows that if idle times have low variability, then idle waiting is not necessary. Only if idle times are highly variable does idle waiting become necessary to minimize the impact of background activity on foreground performance. We further show that if there is burstiness in idle intervals, then it is possible to predict accurately the length of incoming idle intervals and use this information to serve more background jobs without affecting foreground performance.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Storage
ACM Transactions on Storage  Volume 5, Issue 2
June 2009
95 pages
ISSN:1553-3077
EISSN:1553-3093
DOI:10.1145/1534912
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 12 June 2009
Accepted: 01 January 2009
Revised: 01 August 2008
Received: 01 July 2008
Published in TOS Volume 5, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Resource management
  2. background jobs
  3. continuous data histogram
  4. foreground jobs
  5. idle periods
  6. idleness
  7. low priority work
  8. performance guarrante
  9. storage systems

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  • (2023)Page Type-Aware Data Migration Technique for Read Disturb Management of NAND Flash MemoryIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2023.324017231:4(591-595)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Lifespan and Failures of SSDs and HDDs: Similarities, Differences, and Prediction ModelsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2021.313157120:1(256-272)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
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