The impact of digital audio and video on high-speed storage

Digital audio and video are difficult to store and replay due to their real-time nature, high bandwidth, and large size. To investigate the techniques required to support audio and video, a specialized continuous media storage server, in operation since December 1991, was built at Lancaster. This server and the techniques used in its design are briefly described. The current work at Lancaster in distributed continuous media storage servers is then outlined. This work is developing a scalable multimedia storage server architecture that supports wide area multimedia storage; storage server scalability that allows the incremental addition of new nodes; high bandwidth through the use of load balancing, including node striping and file replication; and store-and-forward caching for slower and faster than real-time links. The architecture will allow tens of simultaneous users for classroom teaching and video-on-demand applications