Cost-based media server design

Conventional wisdom holds that reducing disk latency leads to higher disk utilization, maximizing disk utilization leads to higher throughput, and employing a faster disk leads to better performance. All of this is true when building a conventional file or database system. We show that these principles can be misleading when applied to a media server. To design such a server, we propose a cost-based approach that focuses on the per-stream costs. We give various examples to illustrate the design process.