DADA : Dynamic Allocation of Disk Area

With current estimates of data to be managed and made available increasing at 60% per annum, disk space utilization is becoming a critical performance issue for high end users, including but not limited to IT solutions, Storage Area Networks and Virtual Machine environment. We propose Dynamic Allocation of Disk Area (DADA), a disk management framework that performs on-demand disk area allocation on the basis of user access patterns. Results show that our service can reduce disk space utilization upto 20 times when compared to traditional static allocation policies. Also it is shown that using certain pre allocation schemes, minimize the overhead incurred due to on demand allocation. Our experiments indicate that there is a tradeoff between disk utilization and the runtime performance of the programs. We test our scheme on two microbenchmarks with varied properties and show that our framework performs considerably better for non I/O intensive applications. Also we perform experiments on HP disk traces to study the efficacy of our pre allocation mechanisms.