ACTOR: Active Cloud Storage with Energy-Efficient On-Drive Data Processing

Storage systems are indispensable for big data processing and cloud computing services today. The ever-growing size of computation and data analytic results demands larger storage capacity, which challenges data processing and storage scalability. Moreover, the increasing complexity of storage hierarchy and "passive" storage devices make todays storage systems inefficient, which necessitates the adoption of new storage technologies. In this paper, we explore new Ethernet connected drives with on-drive embedded CPU and DRAM to develop an active cloud storage system where data can be processed on disk drives without data movement. These drives are micro-storage servers that can support software-defined storage. In addition to I/O operations, we test and evaluate on-drive data processing, including data compression, aggregation and erasure encoding, which provide natural support for data-intensive applications. Our experimental results show that Open Ethernet Drive can significantly lower the energy consumption while maintaining the data processing throughput simultaneously by ensuring data availability and storage scalability. Results and findings from this work will facilitate scheduling of on-drive compute resource for building active and scalable cloud storage systems.