Green Storage II: Metrics and Measurements

Erik Riedel, PhD, Director, Seagate Research
Patrick Chu, PhD, Research Staff Member, Seagate Research

This tutorial will cover storage-specific topics related to energy-efficiency and outline the current state of the industry.  We will discuss the range of technologies that are currently considered "green storage", including a discussion of metrics for measuring, managing and designing for power in storage systems.  We will also briefly outline ongoing efforts in the SNIA Green Storage TWG and in partnership with The Green Grid, the DMTF and other industry groups.

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the basic concepts of Storage, and that you know something about the Energy and Engineering topics covered in the "Green Storage I" tutorial.  This session is focused on storage-specific aspects of "green" (especially energy and power), covering the following technical topics:

• Metrics and Modeling - what matters for storage power and how can   it be measured.
  
• How Idle Is Your Storage? - balancing energy efficiency with the various background activities that are part of the regular care and feeding of large-scale data storage.
  
• Individual storage devices and associated media, including hard disk drives, tape drives, optical devices, and solid-state storage.
  
• Aggregate devices, including disk storage arrays with varying redundancy (JBOD and RAID).
  
• Comparison of tape libraries and virtual tape (VTL) systems.
  
• Use of spin-down and similar techniques to save power for idle data.
  
• Compression, de-duplication and similar techniques to reduce the number of unintended or excess copies of data.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the storage-specific aspects of "green" (especially energy and power) for storage components and aggregated products (e.g. JBOD, RAID, MAID)
  
• Outline considerations in how to measure and model storage energy and power in storage systems.
  
• Be introduced to technologies that reduce the ongoing energy costs of maintaining the data you manage.
  

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