• Medha Bhadkamkar
• Jorge Guerra
• Luis Useche
• Sam Burnett
• Jason Liptak
• Raju Rangaswami
• Vagelis Hristidis

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of BORG, a self-optimizing storage system that performs automatic block reorganization based on the observed I/O workload.

BORG is motivated by three characteristics of I/O workloads: non-uniform access frequency distribution, temporal locality, and partial determinism in non-sequential accesses. To achieve its objective, BORG manages a small, dedicated partition on the disk drive, with the goal of servicing a majority of the I/O requests from within this partition with significantly reduced seek and rotational delays.

BORG is transparent to the rest of the storage stack, including applications, file system(s), and I/O schedulers, thereby requiring no or minimal modification to storage stack implementations. We evaluated a Linux implementation of BORG using several real-world workloads, including individual user desktop environments, a web-server, a virtual machine monitor, and an SVN server. These experiments comprehensively demonstrate BORG's effectiveness in improving I/O performance and its incurred resource overhead.

• BORG: Block-reORGanization for Self-optimizing Storage Systems pdf ps
  Medha Bhadkamkar, Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, Sam Burnett†, Jason Liptak, Raju Rangaswami, and Vagelis Hristidis
  Proceedings of File and Storage Technologies (FAST), February, 2009.

The code of BORG is not ready to be released. We hope to have a version ready some time soon. However, BORG has similarities to one of our previous projects – EXCES. Several details are the same in both projects and thus the EXCES code can be used as reference.

The traces we use to evaluate BORG are available at: traces