A Low-Cost Storage Server for Movie on Demand Databases

摘要

With recent advances in storage and network technology it is now possible to provide movie on demand (MOD) service, eliminating the inflexibility inherent in todays broadcast cable systems. A MOD server is a computer system that stores movies in compressed digital form and provides support for different portions of compressed movie data to be accessed and transmitted concurrently. In this paper, we present a low-cost storage architecture for a MOD server that relies principally on disks. The high bandwidths of disks in conjunction with a clever strategy for striping movies on them is utilized in order to enable simultaneous access and transmission of "certain" different portions of a movie. We also present a wide range of schemes for implementing VCR-like functions.