An M/G/1 Queue Model for Multiple Applications on Storage Area Networks

Storage Area Networks (SAN) have become one of the most widely used solution for high performance enterprise storage applications. However, the infrastructures of SANs are very complex and varied among different vendors. It is important to understand the behavior of these SANs in order of enhancing performance of the applications that run on them. The main idea of this paper is to understand the behavior of a server-SAN system that manages multiple applications stored in the same volume. We aim at modeling a typical workload of a small company which consists of one license of a database system software and shares that same license for multiple databases. These multiple databases may be used potentially for diverse applications. The objective is then to see how the system would behave when managing queries from different types of databases at the same time. In this paper we will use an M/G/1 Queueing Model to analyze the system and will report our first set of experiments which are composed of two different database workloads based on the TPC-C and TPC-H benchmarks. We show that the model can be used to anticipate the impact of growth in the arrival rate on the behavior of the system. This model has the potential of predicting the system behavior when adding more workloads to the mix.