A bandwidth sensitive distributed continuous media file system using the fibre channel network

Abstract

A recent trend in storage systems design is to move disks to a storage area network for direct client access. While several highly scalable file systems have been built using such direct attached disks, they have all been designed for traditional text-based data, and are not well suited for streaming continuous media, i.e., audio and video files, which are characterized by high volumes of data and require strict timing requirements during storage and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a scalable distributed continuous media file system built using Storage Area Network (SAN)-Attached disks, and describe bandwidth and time sensitive read/write procedures for our file system. We present experimental results on the performance of our Linux-based prototype implementation of the file system and show that the file system can provide strict bandwidth guarantees for continuous media streams.