Efficient Data Migration to Conserve Energy in Streaming Media Storage Systems

Reducing energy consumption has been an important design issue for large-scale streaming media storage systems. Existing energy conservation techniques are inadequate to achieve high energy efficiency for streaming media computing environments due to high data migration overhead. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a new energy-efficient method called Explicit Energy Saving Disk Cooling or EESDC. EESDC significantly reduces data migration overhead because of two reasons. First, a set of disks referred to Explicit Energy Saving Disks (EESD) is explicitly fixed according to temporal system load. Second, all the migrated data in EESDC directly contribute on extending the idle time of EESD to conserve more energy efficiently. Therefore, the EESDC method is conducive to saving more energy by quickly achieving energy-efficient data layouts without unnecessary data migrations. We implement EESDC in a simulated disk system, which is validated against a prototype system powered by our EESDC. Our experimental results using both real-world traces and synthetic traces show that EESDC can save up to 28.13-29.33 percent energy consumption for typical streaming media traces. Energy efficiency of streaming media storage systems can be improved by 3.3-6.0 times when EESDC is coupled.