To bridge the giant semantic gap between applications and modern storage systems, passing a piece of tiny and useful information, called I/O access hints, from upper layers to the storage layer may greatly improve application performance and ease data management in storage systems. This is especially true for heterogeneous storage systems that consist of multiple types of storage devices. Since ingesting external access hints will likely involve laborious modifications of legacy I/O stacks, it is very hard to evaluate the effect and take advantages of access hints. In this article, we design a generic and flexible framework, called HintStor, to quickly play with a set of I/O access hints and evaluate their impacts on heterogeneous storage systems. HintStor provides a new application/user-level interface, a file system plugin, and performs data management with a generic block storage data manager. We demonstrate the flexibility of HintStor by evaluating four types of access hints: file system data classification, stream ID, cloud prefetch, and I/O task scheduling on a Linux platform. The results show that HintStor can execute and evaluate various I/O access hints under different scenarios with minor modifications to the kernel and applications.

In multi-tier storage systems, moving data from one tier to the next can be inefficient. And because each type of storage device has its own idiosyncrasies with respect to the workloads that it can best support, unnecessary data movement might result. In this paper, we explore a fully connected storage architecture in which data can move from any storage pool to another. We propose a Chunk-level storage-aware workload Analyzer framework, abbreviated as ChewAnalyzer, to facilitate efficient data placement. Access patterns are characterized in a flexible way by a collection of I/O accesses to a data chunk. ChewAnalyzer employs a Hierarchical Classifier [1] to analyze the chunk patterns step by step. In each classification step, the Chunk Placement Recommender suggests new data placement policies according to the device properties. Based on the analysis of access pattern changes, the Storage Manager can adequately distribute or migrate the data chunks across different storage pools. Our experimental results show that ChewAnalyzer improves the initial data placement and that it migrates data into the proper pools directly and efficiently.