Mitigating disk energy management delays by exploiting peer memory

Abstract

Modern enterprises employ hundreds of workstations for daily business operations, which consume a lot of energy and thus have significant operating costs. To reduce such costs, dynamic energy management is often employed. However, dynamic energy management, especially that for disks, introduces delays when an accessed disk is in a low power state and needs to be brought into active state. In this paper, we propose System-wide Alternative Retrieval of Data (SARD) that exploits the large number of machines in an enterprise environment to transparently retrieve binaries from other nodes, thus avoiding access delays when the local disk is in a low power mode. SARD uses a software-based approach to reduce spin-up delays while eliminating the need for major operating system changes, custom buffering, or shared memory infrastructure.