Zhou and Colleagues Examine Data Replica Placement in New Study

In a new study appearing in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, TSYS School assistant professor of computer science Yi Zhou and colleagues from Jinan University (China) and the University of Exeter (United Kingdom) examine the role of data replica placement in the mushrooming growth of data volumes.  As they indicate, data replica placement plays a key role in promoting the energy efficiency and service quality of data-intensive data centers.  Data replica placement is the process of placing duplicate copies of data in the most appropriate node in a data grid.  The study by Zhou and his colleagues assert that the existing data placement strategies mainly focus on storage performance improvement or service quality enhancement in data centers, but ignore the ubiquitous issue of heat recirculation.  To fill this void, the new study proposes a thermal-aware data replica placement strategy called TADRP, which aims to improve cooling efficiency and minimize the total power consumption of data-intensive data centers.  This strategy works to place data replicas in disk sequences in a way that conserves cooling costs, total power consumption and execution time.  In their comparison of TADRP to four alternative strategies, they find that TADRP reduces cooling costs by 14.7% to 61.7%, and total power consumption by 19.2% to 55.1%, both without undesirable performance lags.