Storage Quality of Service for Enterprise Workloads

Storage Quality of Service (QoS) is an increasingly critical aspect of modern datacenter workloads, such as virtualization and cloud deployments. Storage resources are in high demand, and highly scaled and deeply layered contention presents many interrelated challenges, all of which must be addressed to meet service level agreements, and to provide predictable response.

This talk presents IOFlow, a new architecture for classifying and queuing storage traffic at dataplane "stages", and a controller to implement policies. Policies such as minimum guarantee, bandwidth limit, and fairness are supported, with diverse classification of storage traffic. Real-world application of the technology to several virtualization scenarios are explored. The IOFlow implementation is independent of the physical storage technology and also the storage interconnect, and therefore can apply equally for block, file and cloud storage.

This effort is joint work between Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Research.

Learning Objectives

Understand new techniques for storage traffic control
Learn how Storage QoS can manage virtual machine workloads
Explore compelling real-world storage management scenarios