Mass data storage system and method of operating thereof

A storage system comprising a physical storage space comprising a plurality of disk drives and operatively coupled to a control layer operable to interface with one or more clients and to present to said clients a plurality of logical volumes, wherein said control layer comprises a cache memory and is further operable:

• to divide one or more logical volumes into a plurality of statistical segments with predefined size;
• to assign to each given statistical segment a corresponding activity level characterizing statistics of I/O activity with regard to data portions within the given statistical segment, said statistics collected over a plurality of cycles of fixed counting length;
• and
• to manage one or more data storage processes in the storage system using said activity levels.

A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium storing computer readable program code for a computer operating a storage system comprising a control layer is operable to interface with one or more clients and to present to said clients a plurality of logical volumes, said control layer comprising a cache memory and further operatively coupled to a physical storage space comprising a plurality of disk drives, the computer program product comprising:

• computer readable program code for causing the computer to divide one or more logical volumes into a plurality of statistical segments with predefined size;
• computer readable program code for causing the computer to assign to each given statistical segment a corresponding activity level characterizing statistics of I/O activity with regard to data portions within the given statistical segment, said statistics collected over a plurality of cycles of fixed counting length;
• and
• computer readable program code for causing the computer to manage one or more data storage processes in the storage system using said activity levels.