224 IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server: Implementing ESS Copy Services with IBM eServer zSeries
5.12 Dynamic workload balancing
With XRC Version 2, a dynamic workload balancing algorithm was introduced. The objective
of this mechanism is to balance the write activity from primary systems, and SDM’s capability
to offload cache during write peaks or temporary lack of resources to SDM, and with minimal
impact to the primary systems.
In situations where the SDM offload rate falls behind the primary systems write activity, data
starts to accumulate in cache. This is dynamically detected by the primary ESS microcode,
and it responds by slowly but progressively reducing available write bandwidth for the primary
systems, thus giving the S