GSAN: Green Cloud-Simulation for Storage Area Networks

The drive towards utilizing green and renewable energy to power large IT data centers is rapidly gaining momentum. Considerable research has gone into developing simulation models to comprehensively study the energy dynamics of different types of data center equipment in order to better understand how best to conserve it. Most of this research has gone towards modeling of servers and switches but relatively less amount of work is available on Storage Area Networks (SAN). Storage Area Networks play a very vital role in the data center architecture by using specialized storage hardware to manage data. In this paper, we have extended the Green Cloud simulator for computing the energy consumed by different SAN components. A simulation environment for SAN has been presented using the 'Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling' (DVFS) and 'Dynamic Shutdown' (DNS) techniques. The simulation results obtained through two SAN prototype models shows the energy consumption of SAN components to vary with the network topology and type of technique used in scheduling of the workloads. Our experimental simulations revealed that there is an increasing percentage of energy savings in DNS mode for both topologies for an increasing number of servers. Results demonstrated up to 35.6% energy savings.