A spin-up saved is energy earned: achieving power-efficient, erasure-coded storage

  • Authors:
  • Kevin M. Greenan;Darrell D. E. Long;Ethan L. Miller;S. J. Thomas J. E. Schwarz;Jay J. Wylie

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of California, Santa Cruz;Univ. of California, Santa Cruz;Univ. of California, Santa Cruz;Santa Clara University;HP Labs

  • Venue:
  • HotDep'08 Proceedings of the Fourth conference on Hot topics in system dependability
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Storage accounts for a significant amount of a data center's ever increasing power budget. As a consequence, energy consumption has joined performance and reliability as a dominant metric in storage system design. In this paper, we show that the structure of an erasure code-- which is generally used to provide data reliability--can be exploited to save power in a storage system. We define a novel technique in power-aware systems called poweraware coding and present generic techniques for reading, writing and activating devices in a power-aware, erasurecoded storage system. While our techniques have an effect on energy consumption, fault tolerance and performance, we focus on a few examples that illustrate the tradeoff between power efficiency and fault tolerance. Finally, we discuss open problems in the space of poweraware coding.