FAST '08 – Abstract
Pp. 313–328 of the Proceedings
Using Utility to Provision Storage Systems
John D. Strunk, Carnegie Mellon University; Eno Thereska, Microsoft Research, Cambridge UK; Christos Faloutsos and Gregory R. Ganger,
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
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. Such 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.
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