A Study on the Use of Tertiary Storage in Multimedia Systems

In spite of the dramatic improvements in the cost of secondary storage, magnetic disks alone are inadequate for meeting the storage and delivery needs of many modern applications. Novel designs of storage hierarchies are needed if we wish to take advantage of the low cost of tape media but still provide reasonable performance characteristics, in the context of modern applications. Specifically, we are interested in multimedia storage server applications, which in addition to high storage and high bandwidth requirements must support display of continuous data streams (e.g., video) and thus satisfy real time constraints. In this paper we focus on the issues and tradeoffs involved in the design of multimedia tertiary storage systems that store and retrieve heterogeneous multimedia objects.