Patent attributes
Distributed storage resources having multiple storage units are managed based on data collected from online monitoring of workloads on the storage units and performance characteristics of the storage units. The collected data is sampled at discrete time intervals over a time period of interest, such as a congested time period. Normalized load metrics are computed for each storage unit based on time-correlated sums of the workloads running on the storage unit over the time period of interest and the performance characteristic of the storage unit. Workloads that are migration candidates and storage units that are migration destinations are determined from a representative value of the computed normalized load metrics, which may be the 90th percentile value or a weighted sum of two or more different percentile values.