Providing Arbitrary-Rate Search in a Fault-Tolerant Continuous Media Disk Array

摘要

Multimedia data, especially continuous media including video and audio objects, represent a rich and natural stimulus for humans, but require large amount of storage capacity and real-time processing. FF (fast-forward) and FB (fast-backward) among end user operations are desirable to find out the scene of interest, but they require non-sequential accesses of disks. When data accesses are clustered to several disks without considering load balance, high quality services in playback may not be available. In this paper, we propose a new disk placement scheme, called PRR_(gp) (Prime Round Robin with Grouped Parities), to enhance reliability using the redundant disk storage spaces, in which continuous media are placed on a disk array to distribute disk accesses uniformly. The PRR_(gp) can not only achieve load balance of disks consisting of a disk array under arbitrary-rate search like PRR (Prime Round Robin), but also improve reliability by storing parity information on the redundant disk spaces appropriately.