Patent ID: 7334092
Filing Date: 2008-02-19
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method of identifying a subset of storage devices of a storage system to participate in a logical volume exchange process for improving performance of the storage system, comprising: (A) during each of a plurality of intervals, assigning respective pairs of swap scores to respective pairs of the storage devices, the swap scores for each pair of storage devices including a source score assigned to a relatively busy source storage device of the pair of storage devices and a target score assigned to a relatively idle target storage device of the pair of storage devices, the swap scores for each pair of storage devices indicating a relative amount of performance improvement of the storage system that would be expected in the interval if a swap of logical volumes were to be performed between the source and target storage devices of the pair of storage devices; (B) for each storage device of the storage system, summing the swap scores assigned to the storage device over the plurality of intervals to generate a summed swap score; (C) ranking the storage devices according to their summed swap scores to identify (1) a set of ranked source storage devices and (2) a set of ranked target storage devices; and (D) forming the subset of storage devices by selecting a plurality of the highest-ranked source storage devices and a generally equal number of the highest-ranked target storage devices.