Examining Energy Use in Heterogeneous Archival Storage Systems

Appeared in Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2010).

Abstract

Controlling energy usage in data centers, and storage in particular, continues to rise in importance. Many systems and models have examined energy efficiency through intelligent spin-down of disks and novel data layouts, yet little work has been done to examine how power usage over the course of months to years is impacted by the characteristics of the storage devices chosen for use. Long-term power usage is particularly important for archival storage systems, since it is a large contributor to overall system cost. In this work, we begin exploring the impact that broad policies (e.g. utilize high-bandwidth devices first) have upon the power efficiency of a disk based archival storage system of heterogeneous devices over the course of a year. Using a discrete event simulator, we found that even simple heuristic policies for allocating space can have significant impact on the power usage of a system. We show that our system growth policies can cause power usage to vary from 10% higher to 18% lower than a naive random data allocation scheme. We also found that under low read rates power is dominated by that used in standby modes. Most interestingly, we found cases where concentrating data on fewer devices yielded increased power usage.

Publication date:
August 2010

Authors:
Ian Adams
Ethan L. Miller
Mark W. Storer

Projects:
Archival Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{adams-mascots10,
  author       = {Ian Adams and Ethan L. Miller and Mark W. Storer},
  title        = {Examining Energy Use in Heterogeneous Archival Storage Systems},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2010)},
  pages        = {297-306},
  month        = aug,
  year         = {2010},
}