[donavanm]

You get similar properties/challenges in lots of multi consumer storage scenarios. I learned lots of similar lessons working on CDNs when it comes to object distribution and access rates.

If youre interested go search for some of the published work from "Coho Data", they had some great usenix presentations IIRC. This was the previous company Andy Warfield was at and they had an emphasis on effective tracking & prediction of IO workloads across very large datasets.