The service oriented infrastructures for real-time applications (“real-time clouds1”) pose certain unique challenges for the data storage subsystem, which indeed is the “last mile” for all data accesses. Data storage subsystems typically used in regular enterprise environments have many limitations which impedes direct applicability for such clouds, particularly in their ability to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for applications. Provision of QoS within storage is possible through a deeper understanding of the behaviour of the storage system under a variety of conditions dictated by the application and the network infrastructure. We intend to arrive at a QoS mechanism for data storage keeping in view the important parameters that come into play for the storage subsystem in a soft real-time cloud environment.
