Scalability issues for mass multimedia storage systems

The storage and bandwidth requirements of digital video and audio exceed those that can be supported by conventional file servers. Despite the emergence of new compression algorithms capable of providing extremely high compression ratios, there is still a challenge to provide optimised storage services capable of storing 1000s of hours of multimedia data and providing simultaneous access to hundreds and potentially thousands of clients. This paper describes a scalable multimedia storage architecture (SMSA) that supports wide area storage, storage server scalability allowing the addition of extra storage nodes, and maximised available data streams through the use of the load balancing techniques of network striping/file replication. It also allows for the storage of multi-resolution data produced by scalable compression techniques to match the Quality of Service requirements of heterogeneous clients.