Tertiary Storage: An Evaluation of New Applications

This thesis focuses on an often-neglected area of computer system design: tertiary storage. In the last decade, several advances in tertiary storage have made it of increasing interest, including increased tape capacities, less expensive tape drives and optical disk drives, and the proliferation of robots for loading tertiary devices automatically. Concurrently, faster processor speeds have enabled a growing number of applications that would benefit from fast access to massive storage. We evaluate the usefulness of current tertiary storage systems for some of these new applications. First, we describe the design and performance of tertiary storage products. Next, we evaluate the technique of data striping in tape arrays. We find that tape striping improves the performance of sequential workloads. Howeve..