Techniques are described for reducing power consumption in a distributed data storage system using a hierarchy rule that is generated based on a spreading policy and a set of tolerable failures. A method may operate to distribute erasure-encoded data of a first data object across first and second portions of a distributed storage system using a hierarchy rule corresponding to a spreading policy based on a set of tolerable failures from which the first data object can be recovered. The method disables the first portion of the distributed storage system that includes a first portion of the erasure-encoded data. The first portion of the distributed storage system is determined according to the spreading policy and the hierarchy rule identifies the set of tolerable failures.