Striping Doesn't Scale: How toAchieve Scalability for Continuous Media Servers with Replication

Multimedia applications place high demands for QoS, performance, and reliability on storage servers and communication networks. These, often stringent, requirements make design of cost-e ective and scalable continuous media (CM) servers di cult. In particular, the choice of data placement techniques can have a signi cant e ect on the scalability of the CM server and its ability to utilize resources e ciently. In the recent past, a great deal of work has focused on \wide " data striping. Another approach to dealing with load imbalance problems is replication. The appropriate compromise between the degree of striping and the degree of replication is key to the design of scalable CM servers. Thus, the main focus of this paper is a study of scalability characteristics of CM servers as a function of tradeo s between striping and replication. 1