Adaptive Data Migration in Multi-tiered Storage Based Cloud Environment

Multi-tiered storage systems today are integrating Solid State Disks (SSD) on top of traditional rotational hard disks for performance enhancement due to the significant IO improvements in SSD technology. It is widely recognized that automated data migration between SSD and HDD plays a critical role in effective integration of SSD into multi-tiered storage systems. Furthermore, effective data migration has to take into account of application specific workload characteristics, deadlines, and IO profiles. An important and interesting challenge for automated data migration in multi-tiered storage systems is how to fully release the power of data migration while guaranteeing the migration deadline is critical to maximizing the performance of SSD-enabled multi-tiered storage system. In this paper, we present an adaptive look ahead data migration model that can incorporate application specific characteristics and I/O profiles as well as workload deadlines. Our adaptive data migration model has three unique features. First, it incorporates a set of key factors that may impact on the performance of look ahead migration efficiency in our formal model develop. Second, our data migration model can adaptively determine the optimal look ahead window size, based on several parameters, to optimize the effectiveness of look ahead migration. Third, we formally and experimentally show that the adaptive data migration model can improve overall system performance and resource utilization while meeting workload deadlines. Through our trace driven experimental study, we compare the adaptive look ahead migration approach with the basic migration model and show that the adaptive migration model is effective and efficient for continuously improving and tuning of the performance and scalability of multi-tier storage systems.