Patent ID: 7281105

Claim:
A method of identifying a subset of a plurality of storage devices of a storage system to participate in a logical volume exchange process for improving performance of the storage system, the method utilizing workload statistics from a plurality of sample intervals in a relatively long analysis interval regarding data transactions directed to logical volumes stored on the storage devices, the method comprising: (A) aggregating the workload statistics over intermediate intervals of each analysis interval to generate aggregated workload statistics regarding the data transactions directed to the logical volumes over each of the intermediate intervals; (B) based on the aggregated statistics, identifying swaps of logical volumes among the storage devices and ranking the swaps according to respective amounts of expected performance improvement for the storage system, each swap involving a relatively busy source storage device and a relatively idle target storage device; and (C) forming the subset of the plurality of storage devices by selecting source and target storage devices of higher-ranked ones of the identified swaps.