Efficient storage organization and access is of central importance to the advent of large scale multimedia systems. Multimedia applications, ranging from video-on-demand (VOD) to medical tele-presense or large scale scientific computations, involve storage and retrieval of large volumes of information subject to a spectrum of real-time constraints. Current storage systems are inadequate to address the needs of multimedia systems. Indeed, various recent experiments in delivering VOD to populations of several thousand customers have established storage access as a key barrier to success. There is thus a growing need for a new generation of high-performance storage technologies that can efficiently support large scale multimedia systems. The main goal of the proposed research is to develop novel architectures and resource management algorithms for multimedia storage systems that will result in orders of magnitude performance improvements. The main thesis pursued here is that a storage system can exploit intrinsic, non-random, access characteristics of multimedia applications to accomplish dramatic performance improvements. This research effort will have several important contributions to the study of multimedia systems in general and to their storage technologies in particular. It will seek to characterize storage access patterns of the broad spectrum of multimedia applications and study techniques to take advantage of these characteristics in improving storage and access efficiency. The proposed study will consider the entire storage hierarchy, study the entire pool of resources and how these resources interact, as well as devise methods for incorporating application and workload constraints and characteristics into resource management techniques. Such media-aware, workload-aware, and application-aware storage organization and access mechanisms can significantly improve performance of a storage server. ***
