File Assignment Policy in Network Storage System

Network storage increase capacity and scalability of storage system, data availability and enables the sharing of data among clients. When the developing network technology reduce performance gap between disk and network, however, mismatched policies and access pattern can significantly reduce network storage performance. So the strategy of data placement in system is an important factor that impacts the performance of overall system. In this paper, the two algorithms of file assignment are presented. One is Greed partition that aims at the load balance across all NADs (Network Attached Disk). The other is Sort partition that tries to minimize variance of service time in each NAD. Moreover, we also compare the performance of our two algorithms in practical environment. Our experimental results show that when the size distribution (load characters) of all assigning files is closer and larger, Sort partition provides consistently better response times than Greedy algorithm. However, when the range of all assigning files is wider, there are more small files and access rate is higher, the Greedy algorithm has superior performance in compared with the Sort partition in off-line.