ABSTRACT

6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '08). Feb. 26-29, 2008. San Jose, CA. Supercedes Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-07-106, September 2007.

Using Utility to Provision Storage Systems

John D. Strunk, Eno Thereska, Christos Faloutsos, Gregory R. Ganger

School of Computer Science
Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Provisioning a storage system requires balancing the costs of the solution with the benefits that the solution will provide. Previous provisioning approaches have started with a fixed set of requirements and the goal of automatically finding minimum cost solutions to meet them. Those approaches neglect the cost-benefit analysis of the purchasing decision. Purchasing a storage system involves an extensive set of trade-offs between metrics such as purchase cost, performance, reliability, availability, power, etc. Increases in one metric have consequences for others, and failing to account for these trade-offs can lead to a poor return on the storage investment. Using a collection of storage acquisition and provisioning scenarios, we show that utility functions enable this cost-benefit structure to be conveyed to an automated provisioning tool, enabling the tool to make appropriate trade-offs between different system metrics including performance, data protection, and purchase cost.

KEYWORDS: utility, storage provisioning, utility-based provisioning, cluster-based storage, genetic algorithms

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