Data Placement Strategy in Data Center

Data centers have been prevalent resources for many years in data intensive applications. Typically, there are multiple servers in a data center to store data and perform computing. One of the last steps of provisioning a data center is to populate the servers with data. In this paper, we consider the scenario that data are transferred from external storage devices. We investigate data placement strategy with the consideration of two competing objectives for data transfer, reducing completion time and enhancing spatial locality. We propose a heuristic solution to jointly consider these two objectives and explore their tradeoff. Performance evaluation shows that with an adjustable balance ratio, a flexible data transfer performance can be achieved.