A test-bed for the assessment of power management strategies in tiered storage systems

Cloud computing systems require a huge number of storage servers, with growing implications for power bills, carbon emissions and the logistics of data centers. These considerations have motivated researchers to improve the energy efficiency of storage servers. Most servers use a lot of power irrespective of the amount of computing that they are doing, and one important goal is to redesign servers to be power-proportional, meaning that the power consumption is in step with the workload. Research on large-scale storage systems is hampered by their cost (Wang et al. 2014). It is therefore desirable to develop a scalable test-bed for evaluating the power consumption of large-scale storage systems. We are building on two open-source projects to construct a test-bed which will contribute to the assessment of power consumption in tiered storage systems.