
5.1  Simulation Results of Each  
I/O Trace Log 
Figures 5 to 8 show storage I/O average response 
time under each condition when the page size is 10 
MB. The vertical axis indicates normalized storage 
I/O average response time, which is set to 100% 
when the SSD and SSD cache capacity rates were 
10% and 100%, respectively. The horizontal axis is 
the SSD cache capacity. The terms F1 and F2 denote 
the simulation conditions in Financial 1 and 
Financial 2, respectively, and “rw” denotes the 
condition under which read requests are swapped for 
write requests. The percentages are the SSD rates. 
“F1-10%”, for example, means the I/O trace log is 
Financial 1 with a 10% SSD rate, “F2-rw-30%” 
means the I/O trace log is Financial 2 under the 
condition that read and write are interchanged with a 
30% SSD rate. “Existing” and “Proposed” in Figures 
5 to 9 mean application of the combination method 
and the proposed method, respectively. When the 
SSD cache capacity rate is 0%, the volume tiering 
method is applied, when it is 20% to 80%, the 
combination method is applied, and when it is 
100%, the SSD cache method is applied. 
We now explain the simulation results under the 
F1 condition. The shortest storage I/O average 
response time with a 10% or 20% SSD rate is when 
the proposed method is applied. With a 30% SSD 
rate, applying the combination method shortens the 
storage I/O average response time. 
The proposed method reduces the average 
storage I/O response time compared to the 
combination methods when the SSD cache capacity 
rate is low. When applying the combination method 
with low I/O locality and low SSD cache capacity 
rates, data are purged with high frequency. There is 
a high possibility that once-accessed data on the 
HDD tier will be purged from the cache without 
secondary access. In this case, the response time 
does not decrease when the second access to the data 
because it becomes a cache miss. On the other hand, 
when applying the proposed method, it is believed 
that data are rarely purged, since the frequently 
accessed area is arranged on the SSD tier, and 
cached data purging does not occur when accessing 
the area. The proposed method, therefore, provides 
shorter response time when the SSD cache capacity 
rate is low. 
The combination method shortens the storage I/O 
average response time compared to the proposed 
method when the SSD and SSD cache capacity rate 
are high. The data that have high I/O frequency is 
allocated on both the SSD tier and  SSD cache.  This 
 
Figure 5: Simulation results under F1 condition. 
does not lead to long response time since high I/O 
frequency data remain allocated on the SSD cache 
even if the page allocated on the SSD tier is 
migrated to the HDD tier. On the other hand, 
because data on SSD tier are not allocated on the 
SSD cache when applying the proposed method, the 
response time becomes long when this page is 
migrated to the HDD tier. The frequency of data 
being purged becomes minimal when the SSD cache 
capacity rate is higher. This indicates that the 
combination method shortens the average storage 
I/O average time when the SSD cache capacity rate 
is higher under the F1 condition. 
Next, we explain the simulation results under the 
F1-rw condition. The shortest average storage I/O 
response time is acquired when the volume tiering 
method is applied under the condition of a 10% SSD 
rate, when the proposed method is applied under a 
20% SSD rate, and when the combination method is 
applied under a 30% SSD rate. This F1-rw has low 
I/O locality and read-intensive workload. It is 
important to note that when the SSD rate is 10%, the 
SSD should be used as a tier because SSD cache 
miss occurs frequently. This was reported in a 
previous study (Hayashi and Komoda, 2013). 
No significant difference is observed when the 
combination and proposed method are compared 
with both 10% and 20% SSD rate. This is because 
the SSD rate is low, I/O locality is low, and it is rare 
that data are allocated on both the SSD tier and SSD 
cache in the case of a large number of reads. When 
the SSD rate is 30%, there is no significant 
difference between the proposed and combination 
methods. However, the SSD cache capacity rate is 
different when the average storage I/O response time 
is minimal with each method. 
The following explains the simulation results 
under the F2 condition. The shortest average storage 
I/O response time is when the proposed method is 
applied with a 10% or 30% SSD rate. With a 20% 
SSD  rate,  applying  the  cache  method shortens the 
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
AverageStorageI/OResponse
Time(Normalized)
SSDCacheCapacityRate
F1‐10%
Existing
F1‐10%
Proposed
F1‐20%
Existing
F1‐20%
Proposed
F1‐30%
Existing
F1‐30%
Proposed
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