International Business Machines Corporation

Peter R Kimmel

Nils Haustein

Thomas Gardelegen

Daniel James Winarski

Erik Rueger

Thorsten Muehge

The invention relates to a tiered storage system comprising tiers of data storage. The tiered storage system further comprises a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor. The memory comprises instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: receive usage data descriptive of usage of memory extents stored by the tiered storage system; identify periodic usage patterns of the memory extents at least partially by calculating a correlation coefficient between the usage data and a predetermined list of conditions; determine a projected data usage for each of the memory extents using the periodic usage patterns, wherein the projected data usage is temporally dependent; sort the memory extents into usage bins according to the projected data usage; and control the tiers of data storage to migrate the at memory extents between the tiers of data storage using temporal changes of the sorting into the usage bins.

Automated predictive tiered storage system

A method is disclosed for balancing the requirements of high availability achieved by redundant active components and power saving achieved by less active components. The requirement for high availability can be expressed by the recovery time objective (RTO) which specifies the amount of time it takes to recover from a failure in the system. Based on the configured RTO, the system configures the most appropriate power mode.

Balancing power consumption and high availability in an information technology system

A system and method are disclosed for balancing the requirements of high availability achieved by redundant active components and power saving achieved by less active components. The requirement for high availability can be expressed by the recovery time objective (RTO) which specifies the amount of time it takes to recover from a failure in the system. Based on the configured RTO, the system configures the most appropriate power mode.

An example of the invention classifies disks drives based on their purpose and associating power-saving policies in multiple classes. The system implements Power On Demand, where a reduced power mode is enabled for every individual component of a storage subsystem. In addition, an embodiment of this invention extends a few power modes used in the prior art and allows almost infinite number of power modes when instructing a disk drive (via its I/O interface such as a SCSI or fiber channel interface) to enter a certain power saving mode. Furthermore, an embodiment of invention teaches a system and methods to save power in a disk system comprising a plurality of disk controllers and a plurality of disk drives, arranged in a plurality of arrays, where each array includes several (e.g., 4-16) disk drives.

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Kaiserslautern, Germany

Peter R Kimmel