INTRODUCTION
Current technological advances will result in a complex distributed multimedia computing infrastracture (like this:
fig. 10-1
)
Interactive nature of multimedia applications requires that the user be able to control the content of multimedia streams
But: most multimedia applications are stored in some kind of storage server
So: the performance of such applications depends directly on the performance of storage servers
Requirements of Multimedia-On-Demand Servers
real-time nature of multimedia data requires QoS quarantees.
should be able to handle a big number of different types of storage devices constracted in a hierarchical fashion
must support thousands of concurrent clients independently
the architecture should be scalable
caching: the required data can be found in remote locations