Data Migration Algorithms in Heterogeneous Storage Systems: A Comparative Performance Evaluation

In large scale storage systems such as data centers, data layouts need to be reconfigured over time for load balancing or in the event of system failure/upgrades. The data-migration problem pertains to computing an efficient plan to migrate data to their target locations. Most of the previous results on data-migration assume that storage devices have similar capabilities and can perform only one data transfer at a time. In this paper, we consider the heterogeneous data-migration problem where we associate a transfer constraint to each of the storage nodes, representing the number of simultaneous transfers that each of the nodes can handle. We introduce new data-migration algorithms for the heterogeneous case and perform an empirical comparative study of the performance of these algorithms against algorithms from [1] and [2].