Staggered striping: A flexible technique to display continuous media

During the past decade, information technology has evolved to where it is economically viable to store and retrieve continuous media data types, e.g., audio and video objects. Systems that support this data type are expected to play a major role in many applications including library information systems, entertainment technology, and educational applications. The objects of this new data type should be retrieved at a pre-specified bandwidth. If an object is retrieved at a rate lower than its pre-specified bandwidth then its display will suffer from frequent disruptions and delays termed hiccups.This paper describes staggered striping as a novel technique to support a hiccup-free retrieval of continuous media data types. Its design is based on a multidisk architecture. It is a flexible technique that can support media types whose bandwidth requirements are either lower or higher than the bandwidth of a single disk. Its design allows a system to scale to thousands of disk drives as its incurred overhead is fixed and does not increase as a function of additional disk drives.This research was supported in part by grants from AT&T/NCR/Teradata, Hewlett-Packard, IBM grant SJ92488, NSF grants IRI-9110522, IRI-9203389, and CDA-9216321 and DARPA contract DABT63-91-C-0001. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Proceedings of SIGMOD '94.