A scalable bandwidth guaranteed distributed continuous media file system using network attached autonomous disks

Repository for continuous media data differs from that of the traditional text-based data both in storage space and streaming bandwidth requirements. The file systems used for continuous media streams need to support large volumes and high bandwidth. We propose a scalable distributed continuous media file system built using autonomous disks. Autonomous disks are attached directly to the network and are able to perform lightweight processing. We discuss different ways to realize the autonomous disk, and describe a prototype implementation on a Linux platform using PC-based hardware. We present the basic requirements of the continuous media file system and present the design methodology and a prototype Linux-based implementation of the distributed file system that supports the requirements. We present experimental results on the performance of the proposed file system prototyped using autonomous disks. We show that the performance of the file system scales linearly with the number of disks and the number of clients. The file system performs much superior to NFS running on the same hardware platform and can deliver higher raw disk bandwidth to the applications. We also present bandwidth and time sensitive read/write procedures for the file system and show that the file system can provide strict bandwidth guarantees for continuous media streams.