This paper highlights the growing importance of storage energy consumption in a typical data center, and asserts that storage energy research should drive towards a vision of energy proportionality for achieving significant energy savings. Our analysis of real-world enterprise workloads shows a potential energy reduction of 40-75% using an ideally proportional system. We then present a preliminary analysis of appropriate techniques to achieve proportionality, chosen to match both application requirements and workload characteristics. Based on the techniques we have identified, we believe that energy proportionality is achievable in storage systems at a time scale that will make sense in real world environments.
A key objective of the IBM Intelligent Bricks project is to create a highly reliable system from commodity components. We envision such systems to be architected for a service model called fail-inplace or deferred maintenance. By delaying service actions, possibly for the entire lifetime of the system, management of the system is simplified. This paper examines the hardware reliability and deferred maintenance of intelligent storage brick (ISB) systems assuming a mesh-connected collection of bricks in which each brick includes processing power, memory, networking, and storage. On the basis of Monte Carlo simulations, we quantify the fraction of bricks that become unusable by a distributed data redundancy scheme due to degrading internal bandwidth and loss of external host connectivity. We derive a system hardware reliability expression and predict the length of time ISB systems can operate without replacement of failed bricks. We also show via a Markov analysis the level of fault tolerance that is required by the data redundancy scheme to achieve a goal of less than two data loss events per exabyte-year due to multiple failures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.