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