Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Recent studies have identified disk storage systems as one of the major consumers of power in data centers. Many disk power management (DPM) schemes were suggested where the power consumed by disks is reduced by spinning them down during long idle periods. Spinning the disks down and up results in additional energy and response time costs. For that reason, DPM schemes are effective only if the disks experience relatively long idle periods and the scheme does not introduce a severe response time penalty. In this paper we introduce a dynamic block exchange algorithm which switches data between disks based on the observed workload such that frequently accessed blocks end up residing on a few "hot" disks thus allowing the majority of disks to experience longer idle periods. We validate the effectiveness of the algorithm with trace-driven simulations showing power savings of up to 60percent with very small response time penalties.