DTStorage: Dynamic Tape-Based Storage for Cost-Effective and Highly-Available Streaming Service

An online streaming service is a gateway providing highly accessible data to end-users. However, the rapid growth of digital data and the corresponding user accesses increase the storage costs and management burden of the service providers. In particular, the accumulation of rarely accessed cold data and the time-varying and skewed data accesses are the two major problems degrading the efficiency as well as throughput of modern streaming services. In this paper, we propose DTStorage, a dynamic tape-based storage system for cost-effective and highly-available streaming services. DTStorage significantly reduces the storage costs by keeping latency-insensitive cold data in cost-effective tape storages, and achieves high throughput by adaptively balancing the data availability with its contention-aware replica management policy. Our prototype evaluated in collaboration with KT, the largest multimedia service company in Korea, reduces the storage costs by up to 45% while satisfying the target performance of a real-world smart TV streaming workload.