Our changing file workloads

From Storagemojo:

 

Some significant differences from prior studies:

  • Workloads more write oriented. Read/write byte ratios and are now only 2 to 1 compared to the 4-1 or higher ratios reported earlier.
  • Workloads less read-centric. Read/write workloads are now 30x more common.
  • Most bytes transferred sequentially. These runs are 10x the length found in the old studies.
  • Files 10x bigger.
  • Files live 10x longer. Less than half are deleted within a day of creation.

Cool new findings

  • Files rarely re-opened. Over 66% are re-opened once and 95% fewer than 5 times.
  • Over 60% of file re-opens are within a minute of the first open.
  • Less than 1% of clients account for 50% of requests.
  • Infrequent file sharing. Over 76% of files are opened by just 1 client.
  • Concurrent file sharing very rare. As the prior point suggests, only 5% of files are opened by multiple clients and 90% of those are read only.
  • Most file types have no common access pattern.

Another interesting finding: 91% of VMWare Virtual Disk (vmdk) files accesses were small sequential reads – not the larger sequential accesses I’d expect.

And there’s this: over 90% of the active storage was untouched during the study. That makes it official: data is getting cooler.

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