Understanding the Performance-Temperature Interactions in Disk I/O of Server Workloads

Abstract

This paper describes the first infrastructure for integrated studies of the performance and thermal behavior of storage systems. Using microbenchmarks running on this infrastructure, we first gain insight into how I/O characteristics can affect the temperature of disk drives. We use this analysis to identify the most promising, yet simple, "knobs" for temperature optimization of high speed disks, which can be implemented on existing disks. We then analyze the thermal profiles of real workloads that use such disk drives in their storage systems, pointing out which knobs are most useful for dynamic thermal management when pushing the performance envelope.