Energy aware RAID configuration for large storage systems

Power consumption of storage at data centers is increasing rapidly. Large storage facilities have various RAID configurations incorporating different RAID levels, numbers of drives, and media types. Nevertheless, few discussions of RAID configurations have been pursued from an energy saving perspective. We first investigate how different RAID configurations affect not only application performance but also power consumption of storage installations. We then present simulation results of power consumption and application performance conducted with various RAID configurations. Results show that a RAID configuration strongly impacts energy conservation based on application I/O features.