Enlarge Bandwidth of Multimedia Server with Network Attached Storage System

Network attached storage system is proposed to solve the bottleneck problem of the multimedia server. It adds a network channel to the RAID and data can be transferred between the Net-RAID and clients directly. The architecture avoids expensive store-and-forward data copying between the multimedia server and storage devices when clients download/upload data from/to the server. The system performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated through a prototype implementation with multiple network disk arrays. In multi-user environment, data transfer rate is measured 2~3 times higher than that with a traditional disk array, and service time is about 3 times shorter. Experimental results show that the architecture removes the server bottleneck and dynamically increases system bandwidth with the expansion of storage system capacity.