1. A method comprising: receiving from a host, a plurality of write requests directed towards a logical unit (LUN), each write request having data, the write request processed at a storage system having a memory coupled to a processor via a memory bus, the processor coupled to at least one storage controller attached to at least one shelf of solid state drives (SSDs); generating an input/output (I/O) workload from the plurality of write requests, the I/O workload including a de-duplication operation; looking ahead into an I/O queue having the I/O workload to predict an expected load on each I/O channel of a plurality of I/O channels included in the at least one storage controller; and controlling a back-end latency of the I/O workload to the SSDs by load balancing the I/O workload among the plurality of I/O channels based on the expected work load on each I/O channel, thereby for the plurality of write requests maintaining a predictable front-end latency to the host.