DESIGN OF A LARGE-SCALE MULTIMEDIA STORAGE SERVER

Large scale multimedia storage servers will be an integral part of the emerging distributed multimedia computing infrastructure. However, gi ven the modest rate of improvements in storage transfer rates, designi ng servers that meet the demands of multimedia applications is a chall enging task that needs significant architectural innovation. Our resea rch project, called Massively-parallel And Real-time Storage (MARS) ar chitecture, is aimed at the design and prototype implementation of a l arge scale multimedia storage server. It uses some of the well-known t echniques in parallel I/O, such as data striping and Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) and an innovative ATM based interconnect i nside the server to achieve a scalable architecture that transparently connects storage devices to an ATM-based broadband network. The ATM i nterconnect within the server uses a custom ASIC called ATM Port Inter connect Controller (APIC) currently being developed as a part of an AR PA sponsored gigabit local ATM testbed. Our architecture relies on inn ovative data striping and real-time scheduling to allow a large number of guaranteed concurrent accesses, and uses separation of metadata fr om real data to achieve a direct flow of the media streams between the storage devices and the network. This paper presents our system archi tecture; one that is scalable in terms of the number of supported user s and the throughput.