Igloos Make the Cold Bearable: A Novel HDD Technology for Cold Storage

The trend of storing (and retaining) everything continues as the rate of data generation grows dramatically. For the organizations that store and retain this data indefinitely, the cost grows proportionally with the increase in data generation. Furthermore, studies have shown that the bulk of this data typically becomes write once read infrequently, or worse never. The cost to store this data therefore pushes organizations away from `always on' storage like SSDs and HDDs to archival storage technologies like tape. However, the limitations of technologies like tape tend to push cold data to read never workloads, reducing the value of the stored data. The Igloo storage device serves to fill this need of affordable and accessible cold data storage. The novel design of the Igloo allows for a data dense device that services 15 times more data than a conventional enterprise class hard drive, while consuming only slightly more power than that same device. Our results show that the Igloo is suitable for cold data workloads while remaining remarkably power efficient. The most power consuming workloads show an average power utilization of only 300 watts for a 4.8 petabyte storage cluster over a simulated six month workload.