Storage Systems for Movies-on-Demand Video Servers

ct In this paper, we evaluate storage system alternatives for movies-on-demandvideo servers. We begin by characterizing the movies-on-demand workload. We brie y discuss performance in disk arrays. First, we study diskfarmsinwhich one movieis stored per disk. This is a simplescheme, but it wastes substantialdisk bandwidth, since disks holding less popular movies are under-utilized; also, good performance requires that moviesbe replicated to re ect the user request pattern. Next, we examine disk farms in which movies are striped across disks, and nd that striped video servers o er close to full utilization of the disks by achieving better load balancing. For the remainder of the paper, we concentrate on tertiary storage systems. We evaluate the use of storage hierarchies for video service. These hierarchies include a tertiary library along with a disk farm. We examine both magnetic tape libraries and optical disk jukeboxes. Unfortunately, we show that the performance of neither tertiary ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: MSS
• Authors: Ann L. Chervenak, David A. Patterson, Randy H. Katz
• Keywords: Disk Farm, Hardware, MSS 1995, Tertiary, We Begin