Disk striping in video server environments

Abstract

A growing number of aipplications need access to video data stored in digital form on secondary storage devices (e.g., vide-on-demand, multimedia messaging). As a result, Mdeo S C N C~O that are respo'nsible for the storage and retrieval, a t fixed rates, of hundreds of videos from disks are becoming increasingly important. Since video data tends t o be voluminous, several disks are usually used in order to store the videos. A challenge is to devise schemes for the storage and retrieval of videos that distribute the workload evenly across disks, reduce the cast of the server and at the same time, provide good response times to client reguests for video data.In this paper, we present schemes that are based on striping videos ($ne-grained as well .as coarse-grahd) across disks in order to effectively utilize disk bandwidth. For the schemes, we show how an optimd-cost server architecture UUI be determined if data for a certain prespecifted number of videos is t o be concurrently retrieved. T h e schemes provide good response times in environments in which the number of concurrent client requests is not much larger than the number of videos that can be concurrently retrieved by the server.

Achieving Reliable Parallel Performance in a VoD Storage Server Using Randomization and Replication

“…Shenoy and Vin studied storage techniques such as static and dynamic load balancing, retrieval techniques such as caching and batching, and disk striping policies based on detailed models of large disk arrays (16+ disks) with variable numbers of clients [30,31]. Other works have considered VoD storage performance with disk striping and interleaving [21,35]. There also have been several studies analyzing the characteristics of streaming media workloads [6,32].…”

Bulk prefetching with deadline-driven scheduling to minimize startup latency of continuous media servers

“…The maximum number of block retrievals (1 ) in a time period defines the maximum number of simultaneous displays (throughput) supported by a disk drive. With 2 disks, the maximum throughput is , see [1,7,11] for details. Assuming CM servers with multiple disk drives, the data blocks are assigned to the disks in order to distribute the load of simultaneous displays evenly across the disks.…”

A Fibre Channel Dimensioning for a Multimedia System with Deterministic QoS

“…Each striping can be wide (over all disks of the server), narrow (limited to a subset of disks, for instance the disks connected to a Fibre Channel arbitrated loop) or single (one disk). The combination of a wide video striping and a single segment striping is also called Coarse Grain Striping in [4] and [5]. In the case of a VoD system based on Fibre Channel technology, magnetic disks are connected to arbitrated loops.…”