Toward cost-effective storage provisioning for DBMSs

Data center operators face a bewildering set of choices when considering how to provision resources on machines with complex I/O subsystems. Modern I/O subsystems often have a rich mix of fast, high performing, but expensive SSDs sitting alongside with cheaper but relatively slower (for random accesses) traditional hard disk drives. The data center operators need to determine how to provision the I/O resources for specific workloads so as to abide by existing service level agreements, while minimizing the total operating cost (TOC) of running the workload, where the TOC includes the amortized hardware costs and the run-time energy costs. The focus of this paper is on introducing this new problem of TOC-based storage allocation, cast in a framework that is compatible with traditional DBMS query optimization and query processing architecture. We also present a heuristic-based solution to this problem, called DOT. We have implemented DOT in PostgreSQL, and experiments using TPC-H and TPC-C demonstrate significant TOC reduction by DOT in various settings.