RESS: A Reliable Energy-Efficient Storage System

Abstract

Extracting high I/O performance from parallel file systems is no longer the only goal in modern data centres. As issues of the Energy Wall and the Reliability Wall become unavoidable, it is a demanding and challenging task to reduce energy consumption in large-scale storage systems in modern data centres while retaining acceptable systems reliability. Most energy conservation techniques inevitably have adverse impacts on the parallel disk systems. To address the reliability issues of energy-efficient parallel storage systems, we propose a reliable energy-efficient storage system called RESS, which aims at improving both energy efficiency and reliability of parallel storage systems by seamlessly integrating HDDs and SSDs. At the heart of the RESS is a transformative middleware layer, which reorganizes the I/O workload for the underlying parallel file systems. With the help of the middleware layer, RESS can distribute popular data to SSDs and put HDDs into the low-power mode under light workload conditions without modification of the parallel systems.