Integrating energy efficiency and security for storage systems

Security requirements and power management have become important criteria for data storage systems in today's world of information security. There exist many security approaches and power optimization techniques for storage systems but most of the existing approaches either concentrate on security or power management. Our approach integrates the power optimization with confidentiality services to maintain the secrecy of the data. Several traditional power optimization techniques involve stopping the disk completely when the loads on the storage disks are really low. Our approach makes use of the new evolving technique, Dynamic Speed Control for power management (DRPM), when the idle times between the requests are not very high. There are numerous security services like confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation that can be provided to secure the data or information communication between parties. We concentrate on confidentiality which is one of the most popular requirements for security services.