Striping Doesn't Scale: How to Achieve Scalability for Continuous Media Servers with Replication

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Date
1999-09-02Author
Chou, ChengFu
Golubchik, Leana
Lui, John C.S.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Multimedia applications place high demands for QoS, performance, and
reliability on storage servers and communication networks.
These, often stringent, requirements make design of cost-effective and
scalable continuous media (CM) servers difficult. In particular, the
choice of data placement techniques can have a significant effect on the
scalability of the CM server and its ability to utilize resources
efficiently.
In the recent past, a great deal of work has focused on ``wide'' data
striping as a technique which ``implicitly'' solves load balancing
problems; although, it does suffer from multiple shortcomings.
Another approach to dealing with load imbalance problems is replication.
The main focus of this paper is a study of scalability characteristics of
CM servers as a function of tradeoffs between striping and replication.
More specifically, striping is a good approach to load balancing while
replication is a good approach to ``isolating'' nodes from being dependent
on other system resources.
The appropriate compromise between the degree of striping and the degree
of replication is key to the design of a scalable CM server. This is the
topic of our work.
Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-45