Daniel J. Ellard, Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, June 2004.

In this thesis, I show how network storage servers can infer useful information about the requests they are likely to see in the future by analyzing the history of requests they have observed in the past. I also show that this information can be used to improve future decisions about disk block allocation and read-ahead and thereby increase network storage server performance without any change to its clients or the applications running on its clients.

Full Thesis (126 pages): PDF or Gzipped PostScript