PERFORMANCE OF A MASS-STORAGE SYSTEM FOR VIDEO-ON-DEMAND

Advancements in storage technology along with the fast deployment of h igh-speed networks has allowed the storage, transmission, and manipula tion of multimedia information such as text, graphics, still images, v ideo, and audio to be feasible. Our study focused on the performance o f the mass storage system for a large-scale video-on-demand server. Di fferent video file striping schemes, such as application level stripin g and device driver level striping, were examined in order to study sc alability and performance issues. To study the impact of different con current access patterns on the performance of a server, experimental r esults were obtained on group access on a single video file and multip le group accesses on multiple video files. All of our experiments were conducted on a fully configured Silicon Graphics Inc. Onyx computer s ystem. The Onyx machine was connected to 31 SCSI-2 channels which have 496 GBytes disk storage, 20 MIPS R4400 processors, and 768 MBytes mai n memory. From the experimental results, the storage system of Onyx ma chine can potentially provide about 360 concurrent video accesses with guaranteed quality of service. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc