Evaluation of tradeoffs in resource management techniques for multimedia storage servers

Many modern applications can benefit from sharing of resources such as network bandwidth, disk bandwidth, and so on. In addition, information systems would like to store data that can be of use to many different classes of applications, e.g., digital library type systems. Part of the difficulty in efficient resource management of such systems can then occur when these applications have vastly different performance and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements as well as resource demand characteristics. We study the performance of multimedia storage systems which serve a mixture of real-time and non-real-time workloads, by allowing sharing of resources among these different workloads while satisfying their performance requirements and QoS constraints. The broad aim of this work is to examine the issues and tradeoffs associated with mixing multiple workloads on the same server to explore the possibility of maintaining reasonable performance and QoS requirements without having to partition the resources.