SRcMap: Energy proportional storage using dynamic consolidation

Abstract

We investigate the problem of creating an energy proportional storage system through power-aware dynamic storage consolidation. Our proposal, Sample-Replicate-Consolidate Mapping (SRCMap), is a storage virtualization layer optimization that enables energy proportionality for dynamic I/O workloads by consolidating the cumulative workload on a subset of physical volumes proportional to the I/O workload intensity. Instead of migrating data across physical volumes dynamically or replicating entire volumes, both of which are prohibitively expensive, SRCMap samples a subset of blocks from each data volume that constitutes its working set and replicates these on other physical volumes. During a given consolidation interval, SRCMap activates a minimal set of physical volumes to serve the workload and spins down the remaining volumes, redirecting their workload to replicas on active volumes. We present both theoretical and experimental evidence to establish the effectiveness of SRCMap in minimizing the power consumption of enterprise storage systems.