Survey of Energy-Efficient and Power-Proportional Storage Systems

Increasingly, large-scale computing systems are consuming more power each passing year. As power consumption is on the rise, concern has been raised over the growing implications on power bills, carbon emissions and power supply limitations for data centers. Computing systems use hardware components that are not power proportional and machines comprising large systems tend to be underutilized, resulting in great wastage of energy. Motivated by this fact, researchers aim to improve the energy efficiency of these systems by increasing resource utilization and exploiting system characteristics in order to achieve power proportionality. However, many challenges burden the task of producing a power-aware, energy-efficient large-scale system that provides the same performance as today's systems. Particularly, storage systems are of great concern since storage consumes a large amount of power in the data center. This paper outlines the main problems and challenges of delivering power-efficient storage solutions, and proposes a taxonomy of power-aware techniques. This work aims to provide a detailed exposition of current trends in power-aware storage systems in a comprehensive and organized manner, outlining and comparing current solutions and challenges.