An infrastructure, method and controller card for managing flash memory in a storage infrastructure. A system is provided that includes flash memory; and a controller that includes: an I/O request handler for handling standard read and write (R/W) operations requested from a host; a garbage collection (GC) system that performs a GC process on the flash memory in response to a threshold condition, wherein the GC process includes GC-induced R/W operations; and a scheduler that interleaves standard R/W operations with GC-induced R/W operations, wherein the scheduler calculates minimum and maximum boundaries for GC-induced R/W operations for a GC process based on an estimated GC latency.