Question:
You can use simple estimates to compare the cost and performance of a terabyte storage System made entirely from disks with one that incorporates tertiary storage. Suppose that magnetic disks each hold 10 gigabytes, cost $1000, transfer 5 megabytes per second, and have an average access latency of 15 milliseconds. Suppose that a tape library costs $10 per gigabyte, transfers 10 megabytes per second, and has an average access latency of 20 seconds. Compute the total cost, the maximum total data rate, and the average waiting time for a pure disk system. If you make any assumptions about the workload, describe and justify them. Now, suppose that 5 percent of the data are frequently used, so they must reside on disk, but the other 95 percent are archived in the tape library. Further suppose that 95 percent of the requests are handled by the disk system and the other 5 percent are handled by the library. What are the total cost, the maximum total data rate, and the average waiting time for this hierarchical storage system?