A load balancing tool based on mining access patterns for Distributed File System servers

Abstract

In this paper we present a new web based Distributed File System server management tool to perform load balancing across multiple servers. The Distributed File System from Distributed Computing Environment (DCE DFS) is a collection of many file systems mounted onto a single virtual file system space with a single namespace. The tool is based on rule-based data mining techniques and graph analysis algorithms. The data mining procedures identify DFS file access patterns and the graph analysis and statistical information relocates the filesets between different file servers. We demonstrate our tool on data collected for five months on DFS servers in a production environment. Experiments with this data show that our load balancing tool is useful to file system administrators to monitor, evaluate DFS state and to make intelligent decisions about file system transfers in order to balance the access request load on "read-write" filesets across DFS servers.