BORG: Block-reORGanization for Self-optimizing Storage Systems

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of BORG, a self-optimizing storage system that performs automatic block reorganization based on the observed I/O workload. BORG is motivated by three characteristics of I/O workloads: non-uniform access frequency distribution, temporal locality, and partial determinism in non-sequential accesses. To achieve its objective, BORG manages a small, dedicated partition on the disk drive, with the goal of servicing a majority of the I/O requests from within this partition with significantly reduced seek and rotational delays. BORG is transparent to the rest of the storage stack, including applications, file system(s), and I/O schedulers, thereby requiring no or minimal modification to storage stack implementations. We evaluated a Linux implementation of BORG using several real-world workloads, including individual user desktop environments, a web-server, a virtual machine monitor, and an SVN server. These experiments comprehensiv...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: FAST
• Authors: Medha Bhadkamkar, Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, Sam Burnett, Jason Liptak, Raju Rangaswami, Vagelis Hristidis
• Keywords: Automatic Block Reorganization, FAST 2009, Non-uniform Access Frequency, Operating System, User Desktop Environments