Design of a Scalable Multimedia Storage Manager

During the past decade, the information technology has evolved to store and retrieve continuous media data types, e.g., audio and video objects. Unlike the traditional data types (e.g., text), this new data type requires its objects to be retrieved at a pre-speciied bandwidth. If its objects are retrieved at a rate lower than its pre-speciied bandwidth then a display will suuer from frequent disruptions and delays termed hiccups. Storage managers that support a hiccup-free retrieval of continuous media data types are commonly referred to as multimedia storage managers. They are expected to play a major role in many applications including library information systems, entertainment technology, educational applications, etc. For the past three years, we have been investigating the design of a multimedia storage manager. The goals of the project are to realize a storage manager that is: 1) economically viable, 2) scalable, 3) fault tolerant, and 4) provides a fraction of a second latency time. By scalable, we mean that the system should be able to grow incrementally as the size of an application grows in order to avoid a degradation in system performance. To realize this objective, the overhead of techniques employed by the system should not increase prohibitively as a function of additional resources. This paper provides an overview of our proposed techniques based on a hierarchical storage platform to construct a scalable multimedia storage manager.