HAG: An Energy-Proportional Data Storage Scheme for Disk Array Systems

Energy consumption has been a critical issue for data storage systems, especially for modern data centers. A recent survey has showed that power costs amount to about 50% of the total cost of ownership in a typical data center, with about 27% of the system power being consumed by storage systems. This paper aims at providing an effective solution to reducing the energy consumed by disk storage systems, by proposing a new approach to reduce the energy consumption. Differing from previous approaches, we adopt two new designs. 1) We introduce a hotness-aware and group-based system model (HAG) to organize the disks, in which all disks are partitioned into a hot group and a cold group. We only make file migration between the two groups and avoid the migration within a single group, so that we are able to reduce the total cost of file migration. 2) We use an on-demand approach to reorganize files among the disks that is based on workload change as well as the change of data hotness. We conduct trace-driven experiments involving two real and nine synthetic traces and we make detailed comparisons between our method and competitor methods according to different metrics. The results show that our method can dynamically select hot files and disks when the workload changes and that it is able to reduce energy consumption for all the traces. Furthermore, its time performance is comparable to that of the compared algorithms. In general, our method exhibits the best energy efficiency in all experiments, and it is capable of maintaining an improved trade-off between performance and energy consumption.