Autonomic exploration of trade-offs between power and performance in disk drives

  • Authors:

  • Alma Riska;Evgenia Smirni

  • Affiliations:

  • College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA;College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Autonomic computing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Over-provisioning is a standard capacity planning practice that leads to disk drives operating mostly under very low utilization (as low as single digit utilization) but that are consuming disproportional amounts of power. Methodologies that place the disk drive into a low power mode during idle times can assist in conserving power. This is a challenging problem because the performance of future jobs cannot be compromised, yet there is no knowledge of future disk arrivals. In this paper we explore the above problem by exploring ranges and trade offs of possible power savings and performance within a set of enterprise storage traces. We demonstrate the difficulty of obtaining significant power savings even in traces where overall utilization is less than 5% and explore the feasibility of popular schemes such as workload shaping for power savings. We also propose a proactive autonomic algorithm that suggests when and for how long a power savings mode should be activated given an acceptable performance degradation target that is user provided. The robustness of the algorithm is illustrated via extensive experimentation.