A scalable distributed multimedia file system using network attached autonomous disks

Repositories for multimedia data differ from those for traditional text-based data both in terms of storage space and streaming bandwidth requirements. The file systems used in the multimedia environment need to support large volumes and high bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable distributed 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 an autonomous disk, and describe a prototype implementation on a Linux platform using PC-based hardware. We present the design methodology and a prototype Linux-based implementation of the distributed file system that supports such disks. We detail 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´s performance is much superior to NFS running on the same hardware platform, and it can deliver higher raw disk bandwidth to the applications. We also show that the file system can provide strict bandwidth guarantees for multimedia streams