The evolution to network storage architectures for multimedia applications

We review and analyze different approaches to designing storage architectures for multimedia applications. We specifically examine scalability and cost of video on demand systems. By examining trends in storage technologies, we note the cost advantages of using hierarchical storage that include both secondary and tertiary storage devices over purely disk based video servers. Finally, we show how using emerging storage area networks allows us to scale both the video content capacity as well as the number of video streams supported