Storage Systems Support for Multimedia Applications

Lately, on-demand streaming multimedia applications have become very popular. Contemporary personal computers can handle the load imposed by such multimedia applications on the client side, but the potentially high number of concurrent users accessing a server represents a generic problem. The multimedia storage system is responsible for storage and retrieval of multimedia data from storage devices, and plays a vital role for the performance and scalability of multimedia servers. It deals with issues related to data placement, scheduling, file management, continuous data delivery, buffer management, prefetching, etc., and with the particular demands of multimedia applications, such as real-time characteristics, large file sizes, high data rates, and several data sources. Performing these tasks and supporting these requirements appropriately are burdened by an increasing speed mismatch between processors and the most prolific and affordable storage devices, – magnetic disks –, and by the introduction of new requirements in new multimedia scenarios. In this article, we give a survey of storage system support for continuous media applications and discuss issues related to integration of different mechanisms for the future multimedia storage systems.