We use an IBM xSeries 345 machine equipped with two Intel Xeon 2 GHz processors, 4 GB DDR, and six 10K RPM SCSI disks (IBM, 06P5759, U160) of 36.4 GB each. A Linux kernel (version 2.6.11) runs on this machine hosting all our applications and standard workload generators. We employ five SCSI disks for the purposes of our experiments, and the remaining one for the operating system, our software, and workloads.