Study on I/O response time bounds of networked storage systems

Abstract

In order to predict and improve the performance of networked storage systems, this paper explored the relationship between the system I/O response time and its performance factors by quantitative analytical method. Through analyzing data flow in networked RAID storage system, we established its analytical model utilizing closed queueing networks and studied the performance bounds of the system I/O response time. Experimental results show that the theoretical bounds are found to be in agreement with the actual performance bounds of the networked RAID storage system and reflect the dynamic trend of its actual performance. Furthermore, it concludes that the CPU processing power and cache hit rate of the central storage server are the key factors affecting the I/O response time as the concurrent jobs are lower, while the network bandwidth and cache hit rate of the central storage server become the key factors as the concurrent jobs go higher.

Keywords

networked storage, performance modeling, queueing networks, I/O response time