Open Ethernet Drive: Evolution of Energy-Efficient Storage
Technology
Author/Presenter
Event Type
Workshop
Applications
Clouds and Distributed Computing
SIGHPC Workshop
TimeSunday, November 12th10:10am -
10:40am
Location507
DescriptionAn Open Ethernet Drive, also known as an OED, is a new
technology that embeds a low-powered processor, a
fixed-size memory and an Ethernet card on a disk drive
(e.g. HDD or SSD). All major storage vendors have
introduced their respective implementations with similar
architectural designs. As the technology progresses into
its second generation, the performance characteristics
have improved substantially. In this study, we first
demonstrate the differences between two generations of
the OED technology. We run a variety of benchmarks and
applications to thoroughly evaluate the performance of
this device and its compatibility with the current
ecosystem. Furthermore, we investigate the performance
and energy footprint of the OED technology when used as
a storage server and as an I/O accelerator. Evaluation
results show that OED technology can be a reliable,
scalable, energy and cost efficient storage solution. It
is a viable replacement for storage servers offering
competitive performance while consuming only 10% of the
power that a typical storage node needs. Finally, this
study shows that OED's can be used as I/O accelerators
capable of executing data-intensive computations (such
as sorting, compression/decompression, etc.) on local
data, whereby the expensive data movement is minimized
resulting in low power consumption.
Author/Presenter
