There are other factors that go into this calculation:

1. This is not a database problem. These are streaming media files. A good
disk layout would use blocks much larger than 4KB.
2. A modern operating system would do both seek optimization and caching. I
don't know how a well written streaming server works, but I would expect
Wowza to read-ahead 30-60 seconds to pre-buffer the stream flow. That's
about 8-16 MB per stream.
3. Your 100 viewers are probably looking at the 10 most recent files, not
100 different files. So there will be a lot of overlap in disk I/O.
4. It's much, much harder to get 100 simultaneous viewers than you think.
You need a VERY large potential viewing audience to achieve those numbers.
For example, if you have 1000 students doing 2 hours a week of viewing,
that averages out to 12 simultaneous streams.

There have been lots of PhD studies on how to optimize a video server. This
discussion could go on and on.

Hank


On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Leslaw Zieleznik
<[email protected]>wrote:

>
> Good point, certainly true for progressive download.
> The worry is in case of streaming when the chunks of data need to be
> delivered simultaneously, unless the streaming server can do the trick?
>
> Lelsaw
>
>
> On 3 May 2012, at 20:13, Hank Magnuski wrote:
>
> Something doesn't seem right here.
>
> 100 viewers x 1 GB each requires a transfer of 100 GB in less than an hour.
>
> An ordinary SATA disk can easily do 100 MB/second so transferring 100 GB
> will take 1000 seconds or 16 minutes.
>
> What's the disk going to do with the rest of the time?
>
> I'd say £100 is more like it.
>
> Hank
>
> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Leslaw Zieleznik <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> We have discussion today about the shared volume storage that can also
>> support streaming.
>> And the conclusion was that to support 100 streams (1GB/hour high
>> resolution recordings) played at the same time,
>> we need a high-performance disk RAID array which may cost at least £20k
>> or rather £50k. The calculation is shown below.
>>
>> Therefore my question is, whether there is any escape from purchasing
>> such an expensive storage?
>>
>> Many thanks,
>> Leslaw
>>
>> And here is the calculation.
>> Take the case of video encoded at 1GB/hour, equal to 300KB/s, stored on
>> a standard disk array with 4KB blocks. A single "viewer" will require
>> the disk to sustain 300/4 = 75 IOPS (I/O operations per second).
>> 100 streams served simultaneously will require 100 times as much I/O, i.e.
>> 7,500 IOPS. A typical 7200rpm disk can sustain at most 150 IOPS (i.e. two
>> streams);
>> a typical 5-disk RAID5 array (e.g. five 2TB 7200rpm disks) would support
>> perhaps 150*4 = 600
>> IOPS i.e. just 8 streams!
>> So the solution is a high-performance RAID array.
>>
>
_______________________________________________
Matterhorn-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn-users

Reply via email to