Investigation of selected disk systems

The large disk systems offered by IBM, UNIVAC, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Data General were examined. In particular, these disk systems were analyzed in terms of how well available operating systems take advantage of the respective disk controller's transfer rates, and to what degree all available data for optimizing disk usage is effectively employed. In the course of this analysis, generic functions and components of disk systems were defined and the capabilities of the surveyed disk system were investigated

Promote-IT: An efficient Real-Time Tertiary-Storage Scheduler

Promote-IT is an efficient heuristic scheduler that provides QoS guarantees for accessing data from tertiary storage. It can deal with a wide variety of requests and jukebox hardware. It provides short response and confirmation times, and makes good use of the jukebox resources. It separates the scheduling and dispatching functionality and effectively uses this separation to dispatch tasks earlier than scheduled, provided that the resource constraints are respected and no task misses its deadline. To prove the efficiency of Promote-IT we implemented alternative schedulers based on different scheduling models and scheduling paradigms. The evaluation shows that Promote-IT performs better than the other heuristic schedulers. Additionally, Promote-IT provides response-times near the optimum in cases where the optimal scheduler can be computed

Implementing and Evaluating Jukebox Schedulers Using JukeTools

Scheduling jukebox resources is important to build efficient and flexible hierarchical storage systems. JukeTools is a toolbox that helps in the complex tasks of implementing and evaluating jukebox schedulers. It allows the fast development of jukebox schedulers. The schedulers can be tested in numerous environments, both real and simulated types. JukeTools helps the developer to easily detect errors in the schedules. Analyzer tools create detailed reports on the behavior and performance of any of the scheduler, and provide comparisons between different schedulers. This paper describes the functionality offered by JukeTools, with special emphasis on how the toolbox can be used to develop jukebox schedulers