The performance of striped disk arrays is governed by two parameters: the stripe unit size and the degree of striping. We have developed techniques for determining the optimal stripe unit size and degree of striping for disk arrays storing variable bit rate continuous media data. This work differs from the prior work on determining optimal stripe unit size and degree of striping for conventional file servers in two ways. First, this analysis is carried out for real-time workloads dominated by large, sequential reads. Second, instead of minimizing the average response time for requests, the model determines a stripe unit size that minimizes the tail of the response time distribution (possibly at the expense of an increased average response time).

Representative Publications:

1. P. Shenoy and H.M. Vin. Efficient Striping Techniques for Multimedia File Servers, Performance Evaluation Journal, Vol. 38, 1999, pp. 175-199. [ Abstract | Paper ]
   
   
2. P. Shenoy and H.M. Vin. Efficient Striping Techniques for Multimedia File Servers, In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV'97), Pages 25-36, May 1997 [ Abstract | Paper ]