Patent ID: 8752055

Claim:
A method for managing workloads in a data processing system, the method comprising: defining at least two different classes of workloads based upon unique attributes associated with each workload of a plurality of workloads, each of the classes associated with at least one class unique procedure for executing a workload that utilizes data processing resources and each class unique procedure is different than procedures associated with other classes, wherein each class comprises a grouping of related policies that manages the workload and considers workload attributes that are unique to the workload and the class associated with each policy, and each policy comprising at least one strategy for managing the workload specific to the class associated with each policy, the strategy considering workload attributes to the workload and the class for executing the workload with minimized degradation to running concurrent workloads and wherein multiple different class unique procedures co-exist and manage a same resource; receiving a request to execute one of the workloads; determining the class of the workload based on the workload attribute to identify the at least one unique procedure defined by the policy for executing the workload to process the request, said at least one unique procedure selected from the group consisting of: a disk I/O management algorithm, a network capacity management algorithm, and a combination thereof; and invoking the identified unique procedure associated with the determined class for accessing the resources requested by the workload.