Dynamic Allocation of Disk Area (DADA)
Jayaram Bobba and Vivek Shrivastava
Abstract: With current estimates of data to be managed and made available
increasing at 60\% per annum, disk space utilization is becoming a critical
performance issue for high end users, including but not limited to IT
solutions, Storage Area Networks and Virtual Machine environment. We propose
Dynamic Allocation of Disk Area (DADA), a disk management framework that performs on-demand disk
area allocation on the basis of user access patterns.
Results show that our service can reduce disk space utilization upto 20 times when compared
to traditional static allocation policies.
Also it is shown that using certain pre allocation schemes,
minimize the overhead incurred due to on demand allocation. Our experiments
indicate that there is a tradeoff between disk utilization and the run-time
performance of the programs. We test our scheme on two microbenchmarks with
varied properties and show that our framework performs considerably better
for non I/O intensive applications. Also we perform experiments on HP disk
traces to study the efficacy of our pre allocation mechanisms.
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