Power management of enterprise storage systems

• Authors: Anand Sivasubramaniam;Sudhanva Gurumurthi
• Venue: Power management of enterprise storage systems
• Year: 2005

Data-centric services, such as transaction processing systems and search-engines, sustain the demands of millions of users each day. These services rely heavily on the I/O subsystem for their data storage and processing requirements. Technological improvements in hard disk drive densities and data-rates have been key enablers in the realization of these storage systems. However, server storage systems consume a large amount of power, leading to higher running costs, increased stresses on the power supply, higher failure rates and detrimental environmental impacts. This thesis makes four contributions towards understanding the nature of the power problem and developing effective solutions to combat its effects. First, it shows that power management is a challenging problem for enterprise storage systems and traditional techniques to reduce power are relatively ineffective in such systems. Second, it shows that the heat that is dissipated due to the high power consumption would significantly restrict the ability to sustain the pace of performance growth of disks in the near future. Third, it proposes a novel disk drive architecture called DRPM that can provide significant savings in energy with very little loss in delivered performance. It also shows how such savings can be attained in practice via a control-policy and considers engineering issues in building such a device. Finally, the thesis shows how DRPM can be leveraged to provide a spectrum of dynamic thermal management policies which would pave the way for maintaining good performance growth in future disk drives.