An energy efficient framework using non-volatile flash memory for networked storage systems

Abstract

In the past decade parallel disk systems have been highly scalable and able to alleviate the problem of disk I/O bottleneck, thereby being widely used to support a wide range of data- intensive applications. Optimizing energy consumption in parallel disk systems has strong impacts on the cost of backup power-generation and cooling equipment, because a significant fraction of the operation cost of data centres is due to energy consumption and cooling. Although a variety of parallel disk systems were developed to achieve high performance and energy efficiency, most existing parallel disk systems lack an adaptive way to conserve energy in dynamically changing workload conditions. To remedy this deficiency, we proposed an energy efficient framework. In the framework, we developed an adaptive energy conservation mechanism that makes use of the Dynamic Voltage Scaling Mechanism to conserve energy in parallel disk systems without sacrificing performance. The framework leverages the adaptor to dynamically choose the most appropriate voltage supplies for parallel disks while guaranteeing specified performance for example disk request’s desired response time. We conduct extensive experiments to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. To validate our framework, we developed an energy aware algorithm that integrates DVS with flash (DCAPS for short).