Storage System Architectures

Abstract

Multimedia systems are similar to traditional computer systems in terms of their architectures. Both types of systems have central processing unit (CPU), random access memory, hard disks, and so forth. The CPU connects to the memory and other components via the memory bus, and it connects to the peripherals via the input/output (I/O) bus. In order to process continuous multimedia streams, multimedia computer systems are built with stringent processing time requirements. Each component of the computer system needs to be able to process large amounts of data, process data in parallel, and finish the processing within a guaranteed time frame. Otherwise, undesirable effects would appear to lower the quality of the multimedia streams. When storage servers are designed to handle multimedia streams, the architecture of the storage servers also needs to handle the processing time requirements. The storage server needs to access data continuously to the clients according to the clients’ requests. Multimedia objects are large, and the magnetic hard disks need to access segments of the objects within a short time. These requirements lead to the emergence of constant recording density disks and zoned disks. We shall describe the architecture of storage servers in the next section. After that, we shall describe the zoned disks performance model.