THE DESIGN OF A STORAGE SERVER FOR CONTINUOUS MEDIA

The increasing use of multimedia in computing is demanding more powerful computer hardware and system software. In particular, the stringent demands placed on multimedia file servers are unable to be satisfied by current magnetic disk technology or by current file systems techniques. This paper describes the design and implementation of a file server which has been specially optimized for continuous media. The critical performance issues which this paper addresses are the use of disk striping to provide high bandwidth, optimized disk layouts, hard real-time disk scheduling to ensure stream storage and retrieval guarantees are met, and a user interface to support high level multimedia abstractions.