HYBUD: An Energy-Efficient Architecture for Hybrid Parallel Disk Systems

Abstract

In the past decade parallel disk systems have been highly scalable and able to alleviate the problem of disk I/O bottleneck, thereby being widely used to support a wide range of data-intensive applications. Optimizing energy consumption in parallel disk systems has strong impacts on the cost of backup power-generation and cooling equipment, because a significant fraction of the operation cost of data centres is incurred by energy consumption and cooling. Although flash memory is very energy- efficient compared to disk drives, flash memory is too expensive to use as a major component in large-scale storage systems. In other words, it is not a cost-effective way to make use of large flash memory to build energy-efficient storage systems. To address this problem, in this paper we proposed a hybrid disk architecture or HYBUD that integrates a non-volatile flash memory with buffer disks to build cost-effective and energy-efficient parallel disk systems. While the most popular data sets are cached in flash memory, the second most popular data sets can be stored and retrieved from buffer disks. HYBUD is energy efficient because flash memory coupled with buffer disks can serve a majority of incoming disk requests, thereby keeping a large number of other data disks in the low-power state for longer period times. Furthermore, HYBUD is cost-effective by the virtue of inexpensive buffer disks assisting flash memory to cache a huge amount of popular data. Experimental results demonstratively show that compared with two existing non-hybrid architectures, HYBUD provides significant energy savings for parallel disk systems in a very cost effective way. Keywords-hybrid parallel disk systems; flash drives; buffer disks; energy conservation; I/O performance