Paper Info
Title
Simulation and performance analysis of the ECMWF tape library system.
Abstract
Improvements in hardware and software have enabled magnetic disks to become an alternative to tape in backup environments. Nevertheless, even considering its slow access times, tape is still part of most hierarchical storage management strategies. The main reasons are cost-effectiveness, long lifetimes, and that tape, continually improved, keeps up with magnetic disks in terms of capacity. The performance of tape libraries, however, has been scarcely analyzed in the literature. In this paper, we present a tape library simulator and analyze workload traces of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Optimizing the cartridge management, we show that the load latency can be reduced by a factor of 2.1 and the number of load operations by 2.5, compared to standard library settings. Furthermore, we present eviction and placement strategies, which can additionally lower the load latency by 20%, achieving the same performance level with considerably fewer drives.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/SC.2016.21
SC
Keywords
Field
DocType
active archive,tertiary storage,robotic tape library,tape library simulation,latency
Hierarchical storage management,Simulation,Computer science,Workload,Latency (engineering),Parallel computing,Software,Virtual tape library,Tape library,Weather forecasting,Backup,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-8815-3
2
0.42
References 
Authors
22
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Markus Mäsker1121.71
Lars Nagel27613.58
Tim Süß35010.80
Andre Brinkmann420227.48
Lennart Sorth5111.03