Storage System and Multimedia: Classification and Extensions

With the increasing processing speeds, there is a shift away from the paradigm of centralized, sequential storage systems towards distributed and network based storage systems. Further, with the new imaging and real time multimedia applications, it is becoming more than ever important to design powerful, efficient and scaleable I/O systems. In this paper, the requirements of storage subsystems in multimedia environment were presented. The storage system components relating to those requirements were analyzed. Current solutions were surveyed and classified. Then we proposed approaches to improve storage subsystem performance for multimedia. The first approach applies constrained layout currently used for single disk model to multi-disk system. The second calls for using a stripping unit that meets both media and storage system optimization criteria. The third uses a pool of buffers instead of single buffer per stream.