In recent work, we have found and explained significant performance and energy variations in systems with directly attached storage; we were able to optimize such systems to improve both energy consumption and performance by as much as a factor of 9 times!
In this project we are investigating the relationship between power consumption and performance for network-based and distributed file systems, using a variety of workloads and settings. Our results are reported under which conditions these storage stacks, extended to the network, consume more power and how performance is affected under those conditions.
Disseminating these results helps inform companies and government agencies, their customers and end-users, as well as the greater user community, how to make the most out of their existing infrastructure. In the long run, we hope these results can lead to a grounds-up redesign of some layers of the storage stack with energy efficiency in mind.