2009/06/12 | Press Release , Achivement and Award

Successfully Development of a New Energy-saving Technology for a High-speed Mass-storage System with a "Power-aware Proactive Data-allocation Method" that Predicts When a Data-processing Starts to Allocate Data Properly.

 Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University (Director Professor Masafumi Yano) and Hitachi, Ltd. (Takashi Kawamura, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer) have jointly developed a new energy-saving technology for a high-speed mass-storage system with a “power-aware　proactive data-allocation method” in a tiered-storage system, which consists of first-tier high-speed storage with high-speed hard disk drives (HDDs) and second-tier mass-storage with high-capacity HDDs.

Tohoku University and Hitachi, Ltd. have applied the newly developed “power-aware proactive data-allocation method” to a storage system for the first time. In this system, the waiting time until a data-processing starts is predicted and only the processed data is copied from high-capacity HDDs to high-speed HDDs before data-processing, resulting in high-speed data-processing. Moreover, the processed data is copied back to the high-capacity HDDs soon after the data-processing ends. This leads to the number of high-speed HDDs being minimized. This new method can achieve both high-speed data-processing and energy conservation in the high-speed tiered-storage systems.

This research has been carried out in “High-Performance Low-Power Consumption Spin Devices and Storage Systems” program under Research and Development for the Next-Generation Information Technology by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

[Contact] Professor Kazuhisa

Fujimoto Research Center for 21st Century Information Technology,

Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University

2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai-shi, Miyagi, 980-8577, Japan

Tel: +81 22-217-5493