Media Storage Performance

This document details work carried out by BBC R&D for the EBU Project Group on Future Storage Systems (FSS).

Media storage is still expensive and very specialist, with a few suppliers providing high performance network storage solutions to the industry. Specifying, selecting and configuring storage is very complex, with technical decisions having far reaching cost and performance implications.

The viability of true file based production will not be determined by storage performance alone.How applications, networks and protocols behave is fundamental to getting the best performance out of network storage.

This paper details the experience gained from testing two different approaches to high performance network storage and examines the key issues that determine performance on a generic Ethernet network.

All the graphs shown were produced from measured performance data using the BBC R&D Media Storage Meter open source test tool.