Storage Management in Virtualized Cloud Environment

With Cloud Computing gaining tremendous importance in the recent past, understanding low-level implications of the cloud infrastructure becomes necessary. One of the key technologies deployed in large Cloud infrastructures namely the Amazon EC2 for providing isolation and separate protection domains for multiple clients is virtualization. Therefore, identifying the performance bottlenecks in a virtualized setup and understanding the implications of workload combinations and resource configurations on the overall I/O performance helps both the cloud providers in managing their infrastructure efficiently and also their customers by means of better performance. In this paper we present the measurement results of detailed experiments conducted on a virtualized setup focusing on the storage I/O performance. We categorize our experimental evaluation into four components, each of which presenting some significant factors that affect storage I/O performance. Our experimental results can be useful for cloud application developers to tune their applications for better I/O performance and for the cloud service providers to make more effective decisions on resource provisioning and workload scheduling.