Multimedia applications place high demands for QoS, performance, and reliability on storage servers and communication networks. These, often stringent, requirements make design of cost-effective and scalable continuous media (CM) servers difficult. In particular, the choice of data placement techniques can have a significant effect on the scalability of the CM server and its ability to utilize resources efficiently. 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 tradeoffs between striping and replication.
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