Reducing Storage Power Consumption with File Layout Optimization in Virtualized Environment

In data centers, huge amount of computes are running. These computes consume enormous energy. For this issue, several challenges were published. An energy efficient storage management cooperated with applications was one of effective approaches. With this method, data and storage devices are managed with application supports and power consumption of storage devices is significantly decreased. However, the existing works do not take account of virtualized environment. Recently, many data intensive applications run in virtualized environment, such as cloud computing environment. In this paper, we focus on virtualized environment wherein plural virtual machines run on a physical computer and a data intensive application runs on each virtual machine, and then discuss a method for saving storage device power consumption with application support. First, we propose a storage managing method using application information. This method removes files from the target storage device, which is the storage device for power saving, and balances loads of the remainder devices in order to avoid large performance decline. Second, we present our experimental result and demonstrate that the proposed method can create long HDD access intervals enough to bring these to power-off mode and save power consumption of storage devices.