Distributed hierarchical storage manager for a video-on-demand system

The design of a distributed video-on-demand system that is suitable for large video libraries is described. The system is designed to store 1000s of hours of video material on tertiary storage devices. A video that a user wants to view is loaded onto a video file server close to the users desktop from where it can be played. The system manages the distributed cache of videos on the file servers and schedules load requests to the tertiary storage devices. The system also includes a metadata database, described in a companion paper, that the user can query to locate video material of interest. This paper describes the software architecture, storage organization, application protocols for locating and loading videos, and distributed cache management algorithm used by the system.

[1]  David K. Gifford,et al.  A caching file system for a programmer's workstation , 1985, SOSP '85.

[2]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  The Evaluation of Video Layout Strategies on a High-Bandwidth File Server , 1993, NOSSDAV.

[3]  Dan Walsh,et al.  Design and implementation of the Sun network filesystem , 1985, USENIX Conference Proceedings.

[4]  Dinesh C. Verma,et al.  A Scheme for Real-Time Channel Establishment in Wide-Area Networks , 1990, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[5]  H.M. Vin,et al.  Designing an on-demand multimedia service , 1992, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[6]  John K. Ousterhout,et al.  An X11 Toolkit Based on the Tcl Language , 1991, USENIX Winter.

[7]  V. Rich.  Personal communication , 1989, Nature.

[8]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  High-performance network and channel-based storage , 1992, Proc. IEEE.

[9]  Michael Stonebraker,et al.  The POSTGRES next generation database management system , 1991, CACM.

[10]  F.A. Tobagi,et al.  StarWorks-a video applications server , 1993, Digest of Papers. Compcon Spring.

[11]  J. Howard Et El,et al.  Scale and performance in a distributed file system , 1988 .

[12]  Lawrence A. Rowe,et al.  A Continuous Media Player , 1992, NOSSDAV.

[13]  Fouad A. Tobagi,et al.  Streaming RAID: a disk array management system for video files , 1993, MULTIMEDIA '93.

[14]  David P. Anderson,et al.  A continuous media I/O server and its synchronization mechanism , 1991, Computer.

[15]  Tim Berners-Lee,et al.  The World-Wide Web , 1994, CACM.

[16]  R. L. Haskin,et al.  The Shark continuous-media file server , 1993, Digest of Papers. Compcon Spring.

[17]  P. Venkat Rangan,et al.  Designing a Multiuser HDTV Storage Server , 1993, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[18]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  Robo-line Storage: Low Latency, High Capacity Storage Systems over , 1991 .

[19]  David K. Gifford,et al.  A caching file system for a programmer's workstation , 1985, SOSP 1985.