Taking off the compute-colored glasses: Storage is vital to datacenter sustainability

By 2050, datacenters are expected to account for over 20% of global carbon emissions. Most of the emissions will be embodied (from manufacturing, transporting, and disposing of datacenter hardware). Unfortunately, the vast majority of research on reducing datacenter embodied emissions focuses on compute, even though the majority come from storage. My research starts to remedy this gap through rethinking storage system design to greatly reduce embodied emissions. In this talk, I will first introduce how IO bottlenecks limit storage's sustainability. I will then present how my projects, Kangaroo and FairyWREN, show that overcoming flash's write limitations enables near-optimal emissions for flash caching. Finally, I will discuss how to curb hard disk drive's IO bottlenecks with Declarative IO to enable desner, lower emissions drives in bulk storage.