In one embodiment, a method comprises, using at least one processor, controlling communication between Service Level Agreement (SLA) processes of an SLA services module and at least one I/O performance gateway; and using a thread pair associated with each of the at least one processors, processing inbound signals from the at least one I/O erformance atewa being sent to the SLA services module via an inbound thread, and processing outbound signals to the at least one I/O performance gateway received from the SLA services module via an outbound thread, wherein the inbound thread and the outbound thread operate asynchronously to provide non-blocking messaging.