Striping in large tape libraries

The authors evaluate the effectiveness of applying data striping concepts to large tape libraries, for randomly distributed access to the tape library. They believe such operations will be characteristic of future tertiary storage databases using large objects, such as online libraries and multimedia databases. Using an event-driven simulator, it is shown that striped large tape libraries perform poorly for this random workload because striping causes contention for the small number of readers and robot arms in these libraries. Increasing the number of readers results in better striped performance. The authors also examine how the effectiveness of striping may change as readers and robots improve in performance. They find that striping continues to be an effective technique for increasing the throughput of large accesses if reader and robot performance scale at similar rates.