On Evaluating the Cost-Performance Characteristics of Disk Storage Systems Supporting Continuous Media 1 D. Venkatesh and T.D.C. Little Multimedia Communications Laboratory Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 44 Cummington Street, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA (617) 353-9877, (617) 353-6440 fax {dinesha,tdcl}@bu.edu MCL Technical Report 04-06-96 Abstract–Disk based storage systems serving continuous media content are evaluated using metrics such as startup latency, buffer size, and the number of concurrent streams. The design of a practical system must evaluate the tradeoffs among these parameters to achieve a target system performance while minimizing operational costs. In this paper, we describe a generic model that can be used for characterizing the performance of disk based storage systems. We subsequently develop a formulation that relates the performance of the stor- age system to the cost of implementation. The model is evaluated using current disk and memory prices to determine the cost per unit bandwidth and cost per session and evalu- ate the best operating point for a given session bandwidth and latency requirement. The results demonstrate the utility of the proposed method in designing video servers. We be- lieve this technique to be essential to evaluate the feasibility of building economical storage architectures. Keywords: continuous media, storage servers, price-performance, disk storage. 1 In Proc. 6th Intl. Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Zushi, Japan, April 1996. This work is supported in part by EMC Corporation and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9502702.