Performance of a mass-storage system for video-on-demand

Advancements in storage technology along with the fast deployment of high-speed networks has allowed the storage, transmission, and manipulation of multimedia information such as text, graphics, still images, video, and audio to be feasible. Our study focused on the performance of the mass storage system for a large-scale video-on-demand server. Different video file striping schemes, such as application level striping and device driver level striping, were examined in order to study scalability and performance issues. To study the impact of different concurrent access patterns on the performance of a server, experimental results were obtained on group access on a single video file and multiple group accesses on multiple video files. All of our experiments were conducted on a fully configured Silicon Graphics Inc. Onyx computer system. The Onyx machine was connected to 31 SCSI-2 channels which have 496 GBytes disk storage, 20 MIPS R4400 processors, and 768 MBytes main memory. From the experimental results, the storage system of Onyx machine can potentially provide about 360 concurrent video accesses with guaranteed quality of service.