The present invention relates to a system and method for allocating and forecasting
computational effort from a plurality of service components among a plurality of
workloads. Preferably, processing power or other computational service is allocated
among the workloads or tasks so as to optimize overall system efficiency and avoid
processing bottlenecks. The inventive mechanism may be advantageously applied to
the migration or movement of data between different levels of a hierarchical RAID
storage system, between various storage systems, and/or between a storage system
and a host device of a data processing system.