ALLOCATING DATA AND WORKLOAD AMONG MULTIPLE SERVERS IN A LOCAL-AREA NETWORK

Local area networks (LANs) have become indispensable in today's highly competitive business environment. A LAN connects multiple file server s for many concurrent information retrievals. The system administrator has to resolve two allocation problems, workload and data. The alloca tion decisions are interrelated; a transaction is routed to the server that contains the data items requested. Affinity-based workload alloc ation is employed, and the database is thus fragmented into data files that are allocated across multiple servers. The paper's two primary o bjectives are (i) to provide a rationale for workload and data allocat ion and (ii) to present an analytical model which will attain effectiv e allocation policies. The integrated problem is presented in the form of a nonlinear zero-one integer program. A special structure of the p roblem is employed to demonstrate the complexity of the problem, and t o propose an algorithm.