Intra-disk Parallelism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Server storage systems use a large number of disks to achieve high performance, thereby consuming a significant amount of power. In this paper, we propose to significantly reduce the power consumed by such storage systems via intra-disk parallelism, wherein disk drives can exploit parallelism in the I/O request stream. Intra-disk parallelism can facilitate replacing a large disk array with a smaller one, using the minimum number of disk drives needed to satisfy the capacity requirements. We show that the design space of intra-disk parallelism is large and present a taxonomy to formulate specific implementations within this space. Using a set of commercial workloads, we perform a limit study to identify the key performance bottlenecks that arise when we replace a storage array that is tuned to provide high performance with a single high-capacity disk drive. We show that it is possible to match, and even surpass, the performance of a storage array for these workloads by using a singl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Sriram Sankar, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, Mircea R. Stan
• Keywords: Disk Drives, Hardware, Intra-disk Parallelism, ISCA 2008, Storage System