Thermo-Mechanical Coupling Induced Performance Degradation in Storage Systems

This paper explores the coupling between power/thermal aspects of data center and the vibrations caused by chassis/server fans in environments dominated by mechanical disks. We show that the leakage power and cooling fan induced vibrations could substantially degrade the storage system performance which in turn could lead to a poor performance and high energy consumption. We then propose our Environment Aware Data Control (EADC) management policy that utilizes built-in instrumentation telemetry and fan-speed control to minimize overall energy consumption while providing a better overall performance. Based on actual experimentation with storage servers in Oracle labs, we show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the energy consumption by 63% while simultaneously reducing the IO delay by 60% as compared to the baseline system with no vibration aware controls.