FSL Sponsor Abstract: NetApp Advanced technlogy Group

The storage stack has been getting more complex in the past two decades, with the addition of complex layers of networking and virtualization. Characterizing the performance of a storage system from an application's perspective has therefore become ever more challenging. In recent years, power consumption has become a critical issue for running large storage systems; energy costs have become a serious and even dominating factor in the operation of large data centers. We believe that performance and energy efficiency are two highly related factors. In this project we propose to investigate and report on the relationship between power consumption and performance in the storage stack, using a variety of workloads and settings. Our results will report under which conditions storage stacks consume more power and how performance is affected under those conditions. In the long run, we hope these results will lead to a grounds-up redesign of some layers of the storage stack with energy efficiency in mind.