Saving disk energy in video servers by combining caching and prefetching

Abstract

Maintenance and upgrades to the significant storage infrastructure in a video server often create a heterogenous disk array. We show how to manage the energy consumption of such an array by combining caching and prefetching techniques. We first examine how seek operations affect disk energy consumption, and then analyze the relationship between the amount of prefetched data and the number of seeks, and the effect of the size of the prefetching buffer on energy consumption. Based on this, we propose a new data prefetching scheme in which the amount of data prefetched for each video stream is dynamically adjusted to allow for the bit-rates of streams and the power characteristics of different disks. We next examine the impact of caching on disk power consumption and propose a new caching scheme that prioritizes each stream based on the ratio of the amount of energy that can be saved to its cache requirement, so as to make effective use of limited caching space. We address the trade-off between caching and prefetching and propose an algorithm that dynamically divides the entire buffer space into prefetching and caching regions, with the aim of minimizing overall disk energy consumption. Experimental results show that our scheme can reduce disk energy consumption between 26% and 31%, compared to a server without prefetching and caching.