Power-Aware Autonomous Distributed Storage Systems for Internet Hosting Service Platforms

We present a power-saving method for large-scale distributed storage systems of Internet hosting services, whose prime example is a video/photo sharing service. The idea behind our method is to periodically exchange stored data among disks in an autonomous way so as to skew the workload towards a small number of disks while not overloading them. The objective of this paper is to explore a power-saving method that is adaptable to both constant massive influx of data and changes in data popularity. The performance is measured both in simulation and prototype implementation using a real access pattern of 20,000 public photos on Flickr. In the experiments, we observed that our method saved 14.5–39.7% of energy, while the overall average response time was 133 ms, where 6.8–19.1% of total accesses were of disks in low-power mode.