A Spin-Up Saved is Energy Earned: Achieving Power-Efficient, Erasure-Coded Storage

Appeared in Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep '08).

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 power-aware coding and present generic techniques for reading, writing and activating devices in a power-aware, erasure-coded 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 power-aware coding.

Publication date:
December 2008

Authors:
Kevin Greenan
Darrell D. E. Long
Ethan L. Miller
Thomas Schwarz
Jay Wylie

Projects:
Archival Storage
Reliable Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{greenan-hotdep08,
  author       = {Kevin Greenan and Darrell D. E. Long and Ethan L. Miller and Thomas Schwarz and Jay Wylie},
  title        = {A Spin-Up Saved is Energy Earned: Achieving Power-Efficient, Erasure-Coded Storage},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep '08)},
  month        = dec,
  year         = {2008},
}