LOW COST STORAGE FOR RARELY READ DATA

• Main Authors: Peterson Eric C, Balakrishnan Shobana M, Harper David T, Glass Adam B, Rowstron Antony Ian Taylor, Donnelly Austin Nicholas, Heil Stephen, Legtchenko Sergey, Butler David Alex
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 02.02.2017
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; CONTROLLING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS; REGULATING; SYSTEMS FOR CONTROLLING OR REGULATING NON-ELECTRIC VARIABLES

Low cost storage for write once read rarely data is described. In an embodiment a storage device comprises a plurality of hard disk drives connected to a server via an interconnect fabric. The storage device comprises a cooling system which is only capable of cooling a first subset of the hard disk drives and a power supply system which is only capable of powering a second subset of the hard disk drives and in some examples, the interconnect fabric may be only capable of providing full bandwidth for a third subset of the hard disk drives. Each subset may comprise only a small fraction of hard disk drives. A control mechanism, which may be implemented in software, is provided which controls which hard disk drives are active at any time in order that the constraints set by the cooling and power supply systems and interconnect fabric are not violated.