Sensitivity Based Power Management of Enterprise Storage Systems

Energy-efficiency is a key requirement in data centers today. Storage systems constitute a significant fraction of the energy consumed in a data center and therefore enterprise storage systems need to deliver high performance in an energy-efficient manner. Static tuning of the storage sys-tem is not sufficient since energy consumption is strongly dependent on runtime variations in workload characteristics. Although dynamic disk power management can enable the storage system to adapt to varying workload conditions, prior work in this area has resorted to ad hoc heuristics that cannot guarantee that the system meets energy-efficiency goals. This paper presents a novel approach to storage power management that uses the sensitivity-based optimization technique.