Techniques for providing storage hints for use in connection with data movement optimizations

摘要

Described are techniques for providing hints. Activity data for data portions is received. For each data portion, activity data is aggregated for each of a plurality of time periods and a value for a metric is determined for the data portion in accordance with the aggregated activity data. The values for the metric are ranked. A set of one or more data portions are identified based on the ranked metric values. Hint generation processing is performed to generate a hint for each data portion in said set. The hint may be used in connection with performing data storage movement optimizations to move selected data portions between different storage tiers having different performance classifications. The metric may be determined using one or more criteria including standard deviation, entropy and/or a maximum probability for a time period having the largest portion of I/O wait time for a data portion.