Patent ID: 7228354

Claim:
In a storage system having one or more resources, one or more clients, a request classifier and a flow controller, a method for optimizing performance comprising steps of: receiving service requests from clients; transmitting the service requests to a gateway for recording timestamps on the service requests: sending the service requests from the gateway to the request classifier: associating, by the request classifier, each service request with a service class, said service class corresponding to a set of operational limits for limiting each service request's use of the storage system's resources, wherein the set of operational limits are determined from performance characters of the system resources and from level of performance guaranteed to each client; determining, by the flow controller, with use of the set of operational limits corresponding to the service class, whether and by how much time the submission of a service request for processing should be delayed; and submitting the service request to the one or more resources for processing based on the determining step of the flow controller.