Abstract—An explosive increment of data and a variety of data analysis make it indispensable to lower power and cooling costs of cloud datacenters. To address this issue, we investigate the thermal impact of I/O access patterns on data storage systems. Firstly, we conduct some preliminary experiments to study the thermal behavior of a data storage node. The experimental results show that disks have ignorable thermal impacts as processors to outlet temperatures of storage nodes. We raise an approach to model the outlet temperature of a storage node. The thermal models generated by our approach gains a precision error less than 6%. Next, we investigate the thermal impact of data placement strategies on storage systems. We compare the cooling cost of storage systems governed by different data placement schemes. Our study shows that evenly distributing the data leads to highest outlet temperature for the sake of shortest execution time and energy efficiency. According to the energy consumption of various data placement schemes, we propose a thermal-ware energy-efficient data placement strategy. We further show that this work can be extended to analyze the cooling cost of data centers with massive storage capacity.

Index Terms—Thermal, model, storage system, cloud

Cite: Xunfei Jiang, Mohammed I. Alghamdi, Maen M. Al Assaf, Xiaojun Ruan, Ji Zhang, Meikang Qiu, and Xiao Qin, "Thermal Modeling and Analysis of Cloud Data Storage Systems," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 299-311, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.4.299-311