Co-Scheduling of Disk Head Time in Cluster-Based Storage (CMU-PDL-08-113)

Disk timeslicing is a promising technique for storage performance insulation. To work with cluster-based storage, however, timeslices associated with striped data must be co-scheduled on the corresponding servers. This paper describes algorithms for determining global timeslice schedules and mechanisms for coordinating the independent server activities. Experiments with a prototype show that, combined, they can provide performance insulation for workloads sharing a storage cluster—each workload realizes a configured minimum efficiency within its timeslices regardless of the activities of the other workloads