Patent ID: 8452941

Claim:
A system controller for an information handling system, the information handling system including a plurality of physical storage resources arranged in a first tier and a second tier such that both a performance and a cost relative to capacity of the plurality of physical storage resources in the first tier are greater than those in the second tier, the system controller comprising: a tier manager in electronic communication with the plurality of physical storage resources; a combined logical address space of the plurality of physical storage resources divided into pages; each page occupying a predetermined and an equivalent portion of combined logical address space; the tier manager configured to perform operations including: determining a seek distance value for each page, the seek distance value defined as an average seek distance between consecutive input-output accesses within a page; determining an operation rate for each page, the operation rate defined as an average number of input-output operations per second to a given page; determining an operation size value for each page, the operation size value defined as an average size of the input-output operations to a given page; determining an elapsed time value for each page, the elapsed time value defined as a time that has elapsed since the last access to a given page; calculating a relative randomness value for each page using at least the seek distance value, the operation rate, the operation size value, and the elapsed time value determined for each page; comparing the relative randomness values for each page; and a classification module in electronic communication with the tier manager and the plurality of physical storage resources, the classification module configured to perform operations including: assigning a physical location for each page such that the relative randomness value for each page in the first tier is greater than the relative randomness value for each page in the second tier; and relocating the pages according to the assigned physical location for each page.