A Spin-Up Saved Is Energy Earned: Achieving Power-Efficient, Erasure-Coded Storage

Storage accounts for a significant amount of a data center's ever increasing power budget. As a consequence, energy consumption has joined performance and reliability as a dominant metric in storage system design. In this paper, the authors show that the structure of an erasure code - which is generally used to provide data reliability - can be exploited to save power in a storage system. They define a novel technique in power-aware systems called power-aware coding and present generic techniques for reading, writing and activating devices in a power-aware, erasure-coded storage system.