Modeling and analysis of hierarchical storage system for massive scale multimedia server

In this article, we investigate the performance behavior of the hierarchical storage architecture. To maximize the performance of the hierarchical storage system, the capacity and bandwidth of individual storage hierarchical needs to be well balanced. Another important factor which governs the performance of hierarchical storage system is the user access pattern. We use two orthogonal performance metrics, namely expected service time and system congestion and blocking probability to evaluate the server performance. We establish an analytical formulation for the given performance metrics and investigate how these performance metrics are affected by the parameter of the individual storage hierarchy. This analytical formulation enables us to investigate the effects of different configurations of the storage hierarchy and different data access patterns; it also provides a framework to determine the optimal configuration of storage hierarchies. The results of a simulation-based performance evaluation are also presented.