Patent ID: 7565484

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for scheduling storage access requests, said method comprising: determining by a computer, by reference to Service Level Agreements (SLA)-based revenues achievable for processing storage access requests, a revenue-maximizing processing sequence for a plurality of storage access requests; and ordering by said computer the plurality of storage access requests in a schedule corresponding to the determined revenue-maximizing sequence, wherein said determining comprises evaluating a revenue function with reference to an estimated latency for each of the plurality of storage access requests, and wherein said revenue function is dependent only on said estimated latency and a non-unity weight associated with said storage access requests such that said revenue function is non-increasing with an increase in latency of said storage access requests, wherein the latency for each request is estimated using: an estimate of seek time for moving a read/write head of a disk drive to a disk track corresponding to a data location of a respective storage access request, wherein the seek time is estimated from characteristics of a respective disk drive, a current read/write head position, and a required read/write head position for performing a requested storage access operation; an estimated data transfer time determined according to a data size of each request and the disk drive characteristics; and an estimated rotational delay for rotating a disk sector, required by the storage access request, into a position required for operation of the read/write head.