Survey on energy-saving technologies for disk-based storage systems

Abstract

The explosive growth of data from various research fields has led to increasing requirement and serious energy consumption of data storage in big data era. As a component of a data center, the storage system consumes almost 27% of the total energy. Therefore, increasing attention has been drawn to the research on energy conservation. In this paper, existing energy-saving methods for disk drives are summarized, which include disk power management, cache management, workload skew and RAID configuration. We find that power management is the basic strategy widely used in other models. Workload skew is efficient for energy saving although it could cause response delay due to the load concentration. Multiple models based on RAID are also developed for energy conservation. In the end, this paper forecasts the development of energy-saving technologies and come to the conclusion that a co-design scheme of hardware and software is necessary for the application-oriented system.