Energy-aware RAID scheduling methods in distributed storage applications

A dynamic power management (DPM) method makes power-mode-related decisions based on the information available at runtime (online) or before (offline). This paper proposes energy-aware RAID scheduling methods to reduce energy consumption for distributed storage applications using both online and offline DPM strategies. The proposed energy-aware redundant array of inexpensive disk (RAID) scheduling method differs from the existing RAIDs method in that it separately strips data and parity blocks and switches the power mode from active to idle or standby while storage applications are not performing any physical I/O operations. Traditional DPM schedulers are applied for a single logical I/O operation or multiple of the logical I/O operations (workload), whereas the proposed DPM scheduler is applied for physical I/O operations. Experimental results show that the proposed storage application reduces average energy consumption by 26–36% compared to existing storage applications.