Special Seminar
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Thursday, February 17, 2005
Room 5-120
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Title: Power Management of Enterprise Storage Systems

Mr. Sudhanva Gurumurthi
Pennsylvania State University

Abstract
Data-centric services, such as transaction processing systems and 
search-engines sustain the needs of millions of users each day.  These 
services rely heavily on the I/O subsystem for their data storage and 
processing requirements.  Technological improvements in hard disk drive 
densities and data-rates have been key enablers in the realization of 
these storage systems.  However, server storage systems consume a large 
amount of power, leading to higher running costs, increased stresses on 
the power supply, and detrimental environmental impacts.  In my talk, I 
shall show that power management is a challenging problem for enterprise 
storage systems and the heat that is dissipated due to the high power 
consumption shall significantly restrict the ability to design higher 
performance  disks in the near future.  I shall then present a novel 
disk drive architecture called DRPM that can provide considerable 
savings in energy with little loss in delivered performance.  Finally, I 
shall show how DRPM can be leveraged to provide a spectrum of dynamic 
thermal management policies, which would pave the way for maintaining 
good performance growth in future disk drives.

Bio
Sudhanva received a BE degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the 
College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University.  His research interests 
are in storage systems, computer architecture, and faulty-tolerance.