Microsoft Research Highlights Power Savings
Researchers from Microsoft have been examining ways to save energy in basic data center processes, and are presenting a paper at Usenix (link via Mary Jo Foley) outlining some of their findings. The paper discusses an energy-saving technique called write off-loading, which alters the input/output pattern in storage systems to generate idle periods during which disks can be spun down save energy. Here's a summary:
Our analysis shows that simply spinning disks down when idle saves significant energy. Further, write off-loading enables potentially much larger savings by creating longer idle periods. To validate the analysis we implemented write off-loading and measured its performance on a hardware testbed. The evaluation confirms the analysis results: just spinning disks down when idle reduces their energy consumption by 28–36%, and write off-loading increases the savings to 45–60%. We believe that write off-loading is a viable technique for saving energy in enterprise storage.The Microsoft research team noted that administrators would need to monitor and manage performance, ans said they are working on tools for this purpose.
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By Rich Miller 
January 28, 2008 | Permalink | >Get Posts By E-mail
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