@article {58, title = {Optimizing Energy and Performance for Server-Class File System Workloads}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS {\textquoteright}10)}, volume = {6}, year = {2010}, month = {09/2010}, abstract = {

Recently, power has emerged as a critical factor in designing components of storage systems, especially for power-hungry data centers. While there is some research into power-aware storage stack components, there are no systematic studies evaluating each component{\textquoteright}s impact separately. Various factors like workloads, hardware configurations, and software configurations impact the performance and energy efficiency of the system. This article evaluates the file system{\textquoteright}s impact on energy consumption and performance. We studied several popular Linux file systems, with various mount and format options, using the FileBench workload generator to emulate four server workloads: Web, database, mail, and fileserver, on two different hardware configurations. The file system design, implementation, and available features have a significant effect on CPU/disk utilization, and hence on performance and power. We discovered that default file system options are often suboptimal, and even poor. In this article we show that a careful matching of expected workloads and hardware configuration to a single software configuration{\textemdash}the file system{\textemdash}can improve power-performance efficiency by a factor ranging from 1.05 to 9.4 times.

}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1837918}, author = {Priya Sehgal and Vasily Tarasov and Erez Zadok} }