Storage system and the multimedia challenges

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. The requirements of storage subsystems in a multimedia environment are presented. The storage system components relating to those requirements are analyzed. Current solutions are surveyed and classified. Then we propose approaches to improve storage subsystem performance for multimedia. The first approach applies a constrained layout which is currently used for a single disk model for a multi disk system. The second calls for using a striping unit that meets both media and storage system optimization criteria. The third uses a pool of buffers instead of a single buffer per stream