Improving I/O performance using soft-QoS-based dynamic storage cache partitioning

Resources are often shared to improve resource utilization and reduce costs. However, not all resources exhibit good performance when shared among multiple applications. The work presented here focuses on effectively managing a shared storage cache. To provide differentiated services to applications exercising a storage cache, we propose a novel scheme that uses curve fitting to dynamically partition the storage cache. Our scheme quickly adapts to application execution, showing increasing accuracy over time. It satisfies application QoS if it is possible to do so, maximizes the individual hit rates of the applications utilizing the cache, and consequently increases the overall storage cache hit rate. Through extensive trace-driven simulation, we show that our storage cache partitioning strategy not only effectively insulates multiple applications from one another but also provides QoS guarantees to applications over a long period of execution time. Using our partitioning strategy, we were able to increase the individual storage cache hit rates of the applications by 67% and 53% over the no-partitioning and equal-partitioning schemes, respectively. Additionally, we improved the overall cache hit rates of the entire storage system by 11% and 12.9% over the no-partitioning and equal-partitioning schemes, respectively, while meeting the QoS goals all the time.