Correcting vibration-induced performance degradation in enterprise servers

Abstract

Server fan subsystems are power-hungry and generate vibrations, degrading the performance of data-intensive workloads and inflating the uptime electric bills of cost-sensitive datacenters. In this paper, we demonstrate a systematic server measurement methodology to isolate different types of vibrations and quantify their effect on hard disks. We introduce a thermal and cooling management policy that mitigates vibrational effects workload scheduling and fan control, and study the benefits of a hybrid storage array with solid-state drives (SSDs) that are impervious to vibrations. We achieve performance improvements of up to 73% and energy savings of up to 76% over the state of the art, while meeting thermal constraints and improving the system's resilience to both internal and external vibrations.