14.arch/RHK.drapeau
.m From alc@allspice.Berkeley.EDU Tue Aug 31 09:45:34 1993
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Tertiary Storage Systems for New Applications

Ann L. Drapeau

(Professor R. H. Katz)

(ARPA/NASA) NAG2-591, 
MICRO, and (NSF) IRI-91-16860

Tertiary storage systems offer tremendous storage capacity.
Unfortunately, tape drives, optical disk drives, and robots deliver
low bandwidth and have long access times compared to magnetic disks.
Tertiary storage systems have traditionally been used for backup. We
are interested in understanding how to configure tertiary storage
systems for effective use in other applications: high-bandwidth access
to mass storage for scientific computing; access to many users in a
large electronic library; and as a large repository of video
information for multimedia databases.

Much of this work focuses on classifying and comparing tertiary
storage systems. It is difficult to compare systems, since drive and
robot technologies have widely varying price, capacity, and performance
characteristics. We are developing a graphical representation of
tertiary array performance that will allow comparison between systems.

Another component of this work is identification of realistic models of
tertiary storage system access for the different workloads: backup,
scientific computing, electronic libraries, and multimedia databases.

A third component of this work is to apply data striping ideas to
arrays of tertiary storage (magnetic tape and optical disk) devices.

We have written a tertiary storage array simulator and are using it
to
compare tertiary array configurations for different workloads.