PERFORMANCE ISOLATION FOR STORAGE CLOUDS

Embodiments of the present invention provide performance isolation for storage clouds. Under one embodiment, workloads across a storage cloud architecture are grouped into clusters based on administrator or system input. A performance isolation domain is then created for each of the clusters, with each of the performance isolation domains comprising a set of data stores associated with a set of storage subsystems and a set of data paths that connect the set of data stores to a set of clients. Thereafter, performance isolation is provided among a set of layers of the performance isolation domains. Such performance isolation is provided by (among other things): pooling data stores from separate performance isolation domains into separate pools; assigning the pools to device adapters, RAID controller, and the set of storage subsystems; preventing workloads on the device adapters from exceeding capacities of the device adapters; mapping the set of data stores to a set of Input/Output (I/O) servers based on an I/O capacity and I/O load of the set of I/O servers; and/or pairing ports of the set of I/O servers with ports of the set of storage subsystems, the pairing being based upon availability, connectivity, I/O load, and I/O capacity.