Workload Characterization for Enterprise Disk Drives

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of drive workloads from enterprise storage systems. The drive workloads are obtained from field return units from a cross-section of enterprise storage system vendors and thus provides a view of the workload characteristics over a wide spectrum of end-user applications. The workload parameters that have been characterized include transfer lengths, access patterns, throughput, and utilization. The study shows that reads are the dominant workload accounting for 80% of the accesses to the drive. Writes are dominated by short block random accesses while reads range from random to highly sequential. A trend analysis over the period 2010–2014 shows that the workload has remained fairly constant even as the capacities of the drives shipped has steadily increased. The study shows that the data stored on disk drives is relatively cold—on average less than 4% of the drive capacity is accessed in a given 2h interval.