Tiger Shark - A scalable file system for multimedia

Tiger Shark is a scalable, parallel file system designed to support interactive multimedia applications, particularly large-scale ones such as interactive television (ITV). Tiger Shark runs under the IBM AIX® operating system, on machines ranging from RS/6000 desktop workstations to the SP2® parallel supercomputer. In addition to supporting continuous-time data, Tiger Shark provides scalability, high availability, and on-line system management, all of which are crucial in large-scale video servers. These latter features also enable Tiger Shark to support non-multimedia applications such as scientific computing, data mining, digital library, and scalable network file servers. Tiger Shark has been employed in a number of customer ITV trials. Based on experience obtained from these trials, Tiger Shark has recently been released in several IBM video server products. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of Tiger Shark, discusses the experience gained from trials, and compares Tiger Shark to other scalable video servers. Trademarks: AIX, RS/6000, Microchannel, and SP2 are trademarks of IBM Corp. NFS is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. XFS is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc. DRAFT of a paper published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 42, Number 2, March 1998, pp. 185-197. Copyright 1998 by International Business Machines Corporation. Copying in printed form for private use is permitted without payment of royalty provided that (1) each reproduction is done without alteration and (2) the Journal reference and IBM copyright notice are included on the first page. The title and abstract, but no other portions of this paper, may be copied or distributed royalty free without further permission by computer-based and other information-service systems. Permission to republish any other portion of this paper must be obtained from the Editor of the Journal.