Weighted striping in multimedia servers

Abstract

To cope with the increasing demand of customers, more magnetic disks may need to be added to a multimedia server to support a higher number of concurrent accesses. Due to the rapid improvement in the performance of magnetic disks, the newly added disks usually have higher sustained I/O bandwidth and bigger storage capacity. The traditional uniform striping in an environment with heterogeneous disks in the same striping group cannot fully utilize the I/O bandwidth and storage capacity of the newly added, higher performance disks. In this paper, we propose weighted striping techniques to fully utilize the I/O bandwidth and storage capacity of higher performance disks in a multimedia server. Our results show that weighted striping techniques greatly improve the performance of multimedia servers.