Reducing energy usage in drive storage clusters through intelligent allocation of incoming commands

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsEnergy usage within data storage drives is minimised by optimising how workloads are assigned to individual drives.One of the first papers to use actual power consumption values from a drive storage cluster.Highlights a new method for even larger energy savings by showing how drives could be put into lower power states without affecting performance. Although significant research has been undertaken to reduce high level energy consumption in a data centre, there has been very little focus on reducing storage drive energy consumption via the intelligent allocation of workload commands at the file system level. This paper presents a method for optimising drive energy consumption within a custom built storage cluster containing multiple drives, using multi-objective goal attainment optimization. Significantly, the model developed was based on actual power consumption values (from current/voltage sensors on the drives themselves), which is rare in this field.The results showed that command energy savings of up to 87% (17% overall energy) could be made by optimising the allocation of incoming commands for execution to drives within a storage cluster for different workloads. More significantly, the transparency of the method meant that it showed exactly how such savings could be made and on which drives. It also highlighted that whilst it is well known that solid state drives use less energy than traditional hard disk drives, the difference is not consistent for different sizes of data transfers. It is far larger for small data transfers (less than or equal to 4kB) and our algorithm utilised this.Significantly, it highlights how much larger energy savings can be made through using the optimisation results to show which drives can be safely put into a low power state without affecting storage cluster performance.

[1]  Pascal Bouvry,et al.  Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for energy-aware scheduling on distributed computing systems , 2014, Appl. Soft Comput..

[2]  Christoforos E. Kozyrakis,et al.  On the energy (in)efficiency of Hadoop clusters , 2010, OPSR.

[3]  Ying Feng,et al.  CLPS-GA: A case library and Pareto solution-based hybrid genetic algorithm for energy-aware cloud service scheduling , 2014, Appl. Soft Comput..

[4]  Michael L. Scott,et al.  Energy Efficient Prefetching and Caching (Awarded Best Paper!) , 2004, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track.

[5]  Mahmut T. Kandemir,et al.  Reducing Disk Power Consumption in Servers with DRPM , 2003, Computer.

[6]  Akshat Verma,et al.  SRCMap: Energy Proportional Storage Using Dynamic Consolidation , 2010, FAST.

[7]  Erhan Kozan,et al.  Profiling: An application assignment approach for green data centers , 2014, IECON 2014 - 40th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.

[8]  Luca Benini,et al.  System-level power optimization: techniques and tools , 1999, Proceedings. 1999 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (Cat. No.99TH8477).

[9]  Ethan L. Miller,et al.  Semantic data placement for power management in archival storage , 2010, 2010 5th Petascale Data Storage Workshop (PDSW '10).

[10]  Mehrdad Tamiz,et al.  Combining simulation and goal programming for healthcare planning in a medical assessment unit , 2009, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[11]  Sin C. Ho An iterated tabu search heuristic for the Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem , 2015, Appl. Soft Comput..

[12]  Luca Benini,et al.  System-level power optimization: techniques and tools , 1999, ISLPED '99.

[13]  Antony I. T. Rowstron,et al.  Write off-loading: Practical power management for enterprise storage , 2008, TOS.

[14]  Michael L. Scott,et al.  Energy efficient prefetching and caching , 2004 .

[15]  Scott A. Brandt,et al.  A Hybrid Disk-Aware Spin-Down Algorithm with I/O Subsystem Support , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference.

[16]  Dylan Jones,et al.  Incorporating additional meta-objectives into the extended lexicographic goal programming framework , 2013, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[17]  Adil Baykasoglu,et al.  Hybridizing ant colony optimization via genetic algorithm for mixed-model assembly line balancing problem with sequence dependent setup times between tasks , 2013, Appl. Soft Comput..

[18]  Keivan Ghoseiri,et al.  Multi-objective vehicle routing problem with time windows using goal programming and genetic algorithm , 2010, Appl. Soft Comput..

[19]  Daniel Schall,et al.  Energy Efficiency Is Not Enough, Energy Proportionality Is Needed! , 2011, DASFAA Workshops.

[20]  Jinoh Kim,et al.  Energy-Aware Scheduling in Disk Storage Systems , 2011, 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[21]  Sandy Irani,et al.  An overview of the competitive and adversarial approaches to designing dynamic power management strategies , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.

[22]  Ricardo Bianchini,et al.  Conserving disk energy in network servers , 2003, ICS '03.

[23]  Maciej Drwal Algorithm for quadratic semi-assignment problem with partition size coefficients , 2014, Optim. Lett..