ECOSTAR - Energy Conservation in Swift through Tiered Storage Architecture
K A Sanjay, Sandya Sivakumar, Sarangi Shreya, H.L. Phalachandra · 2020
The emergence of modern social media that rapidly deploy web-scale applications combined with growing IoT businesses, is leading to an astronomical increase in unstructured data on the Cloud. This is leading to an increase in the number and size of data centers that consume significant power. Thus, creating energy-efficient storage systems, that reduce the carbon footprint of enterprise data centers is an area of interest and need. We propose ECOSTAR, a cost-effective, tiered object storage architecture modeled for OpenStack Swift, that is aimed at significantly optimizing the energy consumption in data centers while keeping availability constraints in check. There has been work towards using Solid State Drives (SSDs) as a staging layer on top of traditional HDDs, to improve request performance and provide greater energy efficiency. In the proposed hierarchical architecture, we extend the tiering approach by introducing a layer of Tape Drives that will be used to store replicas of partitions that are infrequently accessed, providing a noteworthy reduction in energy consumption. Tape Drives also provide increased durability while significantly reducing the architectural setup costs. Tapes, being a means of offline storage, also increases security against cyber attacks. The simulation results using a Dropbox-like workload show that ECOSTAR was able to reduce total disk energy consumption by 25.83 % and improve performance by 27.34 % when compared to traditional Swift.