Retrieving Multimedia Objects From Hierarchical Storage Systems

A multi-level hierarchical storage system (HSS) is able to provide large storage capacity for multimedia data at a more economical cost than disk only systems. The retrieval of multimedia objects from the tertiary storage however imposes substantial performance constraints. As many multimedia applications access objects sequentially following a predetermined order, we have designed a concurrent striping method that store cold objects following this order on the media units. We have carried out simulations to study its performance, and it is observed that this method can improve the system throughput, stream response time, and disk buffer usage.