A scalable storage supporting multistream real-time data retrieval

Abstract. This paper presents a new data placement scheme for continuous-media playback via a scalable storage system. Multimedia contents are segmented into data blocks for the purpose of being stored, retrieved, and manipulated. If these data blocks belong to some continuous media, then they must be handled in a timely manner, for example, being retrieved before some deadline. One of the main challenges in implementing the above system is the simultaneous retrieval of a great number of different media streams from a very large storage system. The proposed scheme efficiently reduces the seeking delay by a very simple placement method and a retrieval scheduler. Thus, both the storage capacity and the number of concurrent accesses to the storage are scalable. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through a simple analytical model and a practical prototype implementation.