Readings in Multimedia Computing and Networking

Random RAIDs with Selective Exploitation of Redundancy for High Performance Video Servers^*

Yitzhak Birk,     [phone], Electrical Engineering Department, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, ISRAEL. E-mail address: [e-mail]

Abstract

This paper jointly addresses the issues of load balancing, fault tolerance, responsiveness, agility, streaming capacity and cost-effectiveness of high-performance storage servers for data-streaming applications such as video-on-demand. Striping the data of each movie across disks in a “random” order balances the load while breaking any correlation between user requests and the access pattern to disks. Parity groups are of fixed-size, comprising consecutive blocks of a movie ...