1. A method comprising: receiving, at a storage system, input/output (I/O) requests to read data from or write data to one or more storage devices, the I/O requests including physical characteristics that indicate locations within the one or more storage devices of the data to be read or written; queuing, within the storage system, a plurality of the I/O requests received by the storage system; when the storage system is ready to process a pending I/O request that has been queued in the storage system, a storage server within the storage system selecting, from the queued plurality of the I/O requests, a particular I/O request to process based, at least in part, on one or more logical characteristics associated with particular I/O requests in the plurality of the I/O requests; wherein the one or more logical characteristics are not the physical characteristics; wherein the one or more logical characteristics include, for at least a first I/O request of the particular I/O requests, an indication of at least one of: a database name associated with the first I/ 0 request, the database name specified by request metadata that accompanies the first I/O request; a workload type, the workload type categorizing work, performed by a first I/O requestor, for which the first I/O requestor issued the first I/O request; or a user name associated with a communication session responsive to which the first I/O requestor issued the first I/O request; processing the particular I/O request in response to the storage server selecting the particular I/O request by reading data from or writing data to a location indicated by particular physical characteristics included in the particular I/O request; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.