MIRAGE: Storage provisioning in large data centers using balanced component utilizations

Abstract

This paper presents MIRAGE, an architecture for data center storage provisioning that takes the approach of maintaining storage services for applications by ensuring well-balanced utilizations in all internal components of the storage infrastructure. We implemented MIRAGE on our local storage infrastructure and observed the sensitivity of the MIRAGE load-balancing algorithm to a combination of performance and heterogeneity skews. We also evaluated MIRAGE by deploying it on a financial data center. We reduced the service times of resource-constrained storage pools by an average of 68%.