eRAID: Conserving Energy in Conventional Disk-Based RAID System

Recently, high-energy consumption has become a serious concern for both storage servers and data centers. Recent research studies have utilized the short transition times of multispeed disks to decrease energy consumption. Manufacturing challenges and costs have so far prevented commercial deployment of multispeed disks. In this paper, we propose an energy saving policy, eRAID (energy-efficient RAID), for conventional disk-based mirrored and parity redundant disk array architectures. eRAID saves energy by spinning down partial or the entire mirror disk group with constraints of acceptable performance degradation. We first develop a multiconstraint energy-saving model for the RAID environment by considering both disk characteristics and workload features. Then, we develop a performance (response time and throughput) control scheme for eRAID based on the analytical model. Experimental results show that eRAID can save up to 32 percent energy while satisfying the predefined performance requirement.