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Visualizing Block IO Workloads

Published:20 March 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Massive block IO systems are the workhorses powering many of today’s largest applications. Databases, health care systems, and virtual machine images are examples for block storage applications. The massive scale of these workloads, and the complexity of the underlying storage systems, makes it difficult to pinpoint problems when they occur. This work attempts to shed light on workload patterns through visualization, aiding our intuition.

We describe our experience in the last 3 years of analyzing and visualizing customer traces from XIV, an IBM enterprise block storage system. We also present results from applying the same visualization technology to Linux filesystems.

We show how visualization aids our understanding of workloads and how it assists in resolving customer performance problems.

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            • Published in

              cover image ACM Transactions on Storage
              ACM Transactions on Storage  Volume 11, Issue 2
              March 2015
              123 pages
              ISSN:1553-3077
              EISSN:1553-3093
              DOI:10.1145/2747982
              • Editor:
              • Darrell Long
              Issue’s Table of Contents

              Copyright © 2015 ACM

              Publisher

              Association for Computing Machinery

              New York, NY, United States

              Publication History

              • Published: 20 March 2015
              • Accepted: 1 July 2014
              • Received: 1 October 2013
              Published in tos Volume 11, Issue 2

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