Energy conservation techniques for disk array-based servers

  • Authors:

  • Eduardo Pinheiro;Ricardo Bianchini

  • Affiliations:

  • Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In this paper, we study energy conservation techniques for disk array-based network servers. First, we introduce a new conservation technique, called Popular Data Concentration (PDC), that migrates frequently accessed data to a subset of the disks. The goal is to skew the load towards a few of the disks, so that others can be transitioned to low-power modes. Next, we introduce a user-level file server that takes advantage of PDC. In the context of this server, we compare PDC to the Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID). Using a validated simulator, we evaluate these techniques for conventional and two-speed disks and a wide range of parameters. Our results for conventional disks show that PDC and MAID can only conserve energy when the load on the server is extremely low. When two-speed disks are used, both PDC and MAID can conserve significant energy with only a small fraction of delayed requests. Overall, we find that PDC achieves more consistent and robust energy savings than MAID.