Over the years and with the help of non-stop advances in technology, manufacturers of various products have evolved and tailored their product offerings to an ever-changing, ever-maturing, and ever-increasingly savvy consumer. From Henry Ford’s “you can have any color you want as long as it’s black” to today’s almost mind-numbingly array of car choices (luxury, sports, compact, SUV) and options (color, entertainment, engine type), consumers can customize and optimize their automobile purchases to their specific tastes, preferences, and values.
So what does a walk down the automobile history memory lane have to do with storage systems and energy efficiency? Storage systems vendors have long offered customers different models primarily based on performance or capacity and sold mostly on a $/GB basis. More recently storage systems are offering features to provide further differentiation, customization, and optimization – continuous performance improvement, but increasingly around utilization and efficiency leading toward a concept of Green Quality of Service (QoS).
Green QoS refers to a system’s ability to operate at different levels of power consumption and energy efficiency based on user-defined variables and policies. Thin provisioning – the ability to configure a system making it think it has more capacity than what’s physically there – is a form Green QoS. Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) that limit the number of spindles that can be active at any single point in time – thus reducing the power consumed— albeit at a drastically reduced maximum performance ability than a similarly configured system that allowed all disks to be active at the same time—is another. Tiered storage—the ability to place data on and move data to the appropriate type of storage based on usage, access patterns, and user-defined performance requirements-is a third.
True Green QoS will take these kinds of features and go even further, to the point of dynamically configuring and balancing a system’s capabilities based on what’s uniquely important to a given customer or application environment. For example, if a system is designed to support the performance capabilities of hundreds of drives, yet is only configured with 50-to-60 drives, other resources throughout the system may be over-provisioned for that specific configuration. And over-provisioning usually means excess power being consumed and unnecessary heat being generated.
What are some of the storage system resources that could provide hooks for this type of control? Processor speed, I/O channel rate, I/O phys, memory speed, redundant controllers, and redundant power supplies provide but a few of the hooks storage system vendors can begin to innovate with in providing more granular Green QoS.
Action Item: The next wave of Green QoS will begin to isolate over-provisioned system resources, monitor them, and provide hooks to control them. Customers will increasingly be given the choice of what they optimize in their system–performance, energy efficiency, availability, reliability. And ultimately, the systems will have the capability to do this balancing dynamically and transparently.
Footnotes: The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of LSI Corporation.