Analysis of Workload Behavior in Scientific and Historical Long-Term Data Repositories

The scope of archival systems is expanding beyond cheap tertiary storage: scientific and medical data is increasingly digital, and the public has a growing desire to digitally record their personal histories. Driven by the increased cost efficiency of hard drives compared to tape, and the rise of the Internet, content archives have become a means of providing the public with fast, cheap access to long-term data. Unfortunately, designers of purpose-built archival systems are either forced to rely on workload behavior obtained from a narrow, anachronistic view of archives as simply cheap tertiary storage, or extrapolate from marginally related enterprise workload data and traditional library access patterns.