An Analysis of Striping in Scalable Multi-Disk Video Servers

With a scalable video server, the number of simultaneous displays supported by the system increases as a function of additional resources. Such a server can support those applications that strive to support either hundreds (e.g., a hotel providing service to its guests) or thousands (e.g., a cable company providing service to a city) of simultaneous displays. The only difference between the different systems is the size of their hardware platform, i.e., number of disks, amount of memory, etc. Striping is a technique that distributes the workload of a display evenly across the available resources and is the key to realizing a scalable server. While it is desirable for the number of concurrent displays to scale as a function of additional resources, it is also desirable for the startup latency to not increase. (Startup latency is defined as the amount of time elapsed from when a request is issued to the time that its display starts.) In this paper, we develop analytical models that estim..