More cost-effective, and scalable media server with an open architecture

摘要

Multi-media servers (10) provide clients (12) with streaming data requiring soft real-time guarantee and static data requiring a large amount of storage space. The servers (10) use a pull-mode protocol to communicate with clients through a real-time network. Separate data and control channels enhance the soft real-time capability of the server. The data channel (23) conforms to open standard protocol. A switched data link layer for the control channel (25) permits separate intrahost control messages that may be multicast and broadcast. The distributed file system (26) selects a specific data block size based upon the compression technique employed to enhance soft real-time guarantee. A hierarchical data structure combined with merging empty data blocks minimizes disk fragmentation. Data blocks are striped across multiple disks to improve disk utilization. A local buffer and a queue for both read and write requests provide support for simultaneous read and write data streams.