FBctlr - A Novel Approach for Storage Performance Virtualization

I/O consolidation is a growing trend in production environments due to increasing complexity in tuning and managing storage systems. A consequence of this trend is the need to serve multiple users and/or workloads simultaneously. It is imperative to ensure that these users are insulated from each other by virtualization in order to meet their specific performance requirements. This paper proposes a new approach based on feedback control loops that can enforce desired relative throughput guarantees via dynamic I/O resource reallocation. Simulation results under various types of competing I/O workloads validate that FBctlr can provide better performance virtualization than previous approaches.