Designing data storage tier using Integer Programing
Michael O’Sullivan, Cameron Graham Walker, Dongjin Lee · 2012
Data storage tiers are increasing in size to support the demands for high capacity and performance, and so the tiers with a capacity of hundreds of TB or even PB are becoming more prevalent. The design of a storage tier of this scale is a complex task involving many competing criteria such as capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). In this paper we present an Operations Research (OR) approach for the optimal design of storage tiers -- by taking various considerations from the system components and their interconnections -- so as to ultimately scale out to a much larger storage tier. By combining well-known Integer Programming in an innovative way we can automatically design storage tiers with capacities of hundreds of TB in reasonable time. Additionally, we demonstrate our method using a real-world case study involving the design of a disk-based archival storage tier.