SLA-aware data migration in a shared hybrid storage cluster

Data volume in today’s world has been tremendously increased. Large-scaled and diverse data sets are raising new big challenges of storage, process, and query. Particularly, real-time data analysis becomes more and more frequently. Multi-tiered, hybrid storage architectures, which provide a solid way to combine solid-state drives with hard disk drives (HDDs), therefore become attractive in enterprise data centers for achieving high performance and large capacity simultaneously. However, from service provider’s perspective, how to efficiently manage all the data hosted in data center in order to provide high quality of service (QoS) is still a core and difficult problem. The modern enterprise data centers often provide the shared storage resources to a large variety of applications which might demand for different service level agreements (SLAs). Furthermore, any user query from a data-intensive application could easily trigger a scan of a gigantic data set and inject a burst of disk I/Os to the back-end storage system, which will eventually cause disastrous performance degradation. Therefore, in the paper, we present a new approach for automated data movement in multi-tiered, hybrid storage clusters, which lively migrates the data among different storage media devices, aiming to support multiple SLAs for applications with dynamic workloads at the minimal cost. Detailed trace-driven simulations show that this new approach significantly improves the overall performance, providing higher QoS for applications and reducing the occurrence of SLA violations. Sensitivity analysis under different system environments further validates the effectiveness and robustness of the approach.