Patent ID: 7809915
Filing Date: 2010-10-05
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A computer program embodied on a computer readable medium, comprising: program instructions for identifying at least one pool including one or more ranks to optimize volume allocation of a storage workload into a storage system using a performance-based volume allocation (PVA) algorithm, where selection of the at least one rank within the at least one pool for allocation is not controlled by the PVA algorithm; program instructions for determining a surrogate set for each rank of the one or more ranks, where the surrogate set comprises a subset of the one or more ranks of the at least one pool; program instructions for calculating a space limit value of the at least one pool based on the surrogate set; and program instructions for utilizing the space limit value in the PVA algorithm in order to optimize the volume allocation of the storage workload into the storage system; wherein the space limit value is an amount of space that can be assigned to the at least one pool without increasing performance utilization above a performance threshold, the PVA algorithm calculates costs to calculate the space limit value in order to determine the volume allocation of the storage workload into the storage system, and the space limit value is calculated from a space limit for ranks and the space limit for ranks is calculated from the costs using an adjusted utilization cost for the one or more ranks.