CloudSimDisk: Energy-Aware Storage Simulation in CloudSim

The cloud computing paradigm is continually evolving, and with it, the size and the complexity of its infrastructure. Assessing the performance of a cloud environment is an essential but an arduous task. Further, the energy consumed by data centers is steadily increasing and major components such as the storage systems need to be more energy efficient. Cloud simulation tools have proved quite useful to study these issues. However, these simulation tools lack mechanisms to study energy efficient storage in cloud systems. This paper contributes in the area of cloud computing by extending the widely used cloud simulator CloudSim. In this paper, we propose CloudSimDisk, a scalable module for modeling and simulation of energy-aware storage in cloud systems. We show how CloudSimDisk can be used to simulate energy-aware storage, and can be extended to study new algorithms for energy-awareness in cloud systems. Our simulation results proved to be in accordance with the analytical models that were developed to model energy consumption of hard disk drives in cloud systems. The source code of CloudSimDisk is also made available for the research community for further testing and development.