Storage virtualization system with load balancing for SAN

Abstract

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) has been a key subsystem for online disk storage management. Additional layer is created in the kernel to present a logical view of physical storage devices. Many transparent functions can be implemented between the logical and physical layers, such as merging several physical disks into a larger logical device, resizing logical devices without stopping the system. In a logical volume group, files can be striped into several physical disks so as to achieve high I/O performance. But data I/O parallelism by itself does not guarantee the optimal performance of an application since higher data throughput does not necessarily result in better application performance. This paper studied the dynamic load balancing and data redistribution algorithms in the storage visualization layer when the load becomes imbalanced across the disks due to access pattern fluctuation. An extension of the heuristic load balancing method was proposed to the storage virtualization subsystem of Tsinghua-Mass Storage Network System (TH-MSNS). Logical volume I/O request status is monitored and the physical disks are sorted according to the access number of Logical Extents (LE) per time unit. The I/O operations on a LE of the hottest disk are transparently migrated to other disks. The preliminary performance simulations under a WWW server file access workload give satisfactory results by the promising cooling algorithm in storage virtualization systems. © Springer-Verlag 2004.