Design and implementation of a bandwidth sensitive distributed continuous media file system using the fibre channel network

Abstract

With the advent of Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Disks (NASD), a new trend in storage systems design is to move disks from behind storage servers and attach them to a SAN for direct client access. Such designs remove storage servers from the path of data transfer leading to highly scalable file systems. While there exists many file systems built using such direct attached disks, they are all optimized for traditional text-based data and are not well-suited for streaming continuous media, i.e., audio and video data. In this paper we present the architectural details of a scalable distributed continuous media file system built using SAN-attached disks. We describe the implementation details of our Linux-based prototype and show by experimention that the performance of our file system scales linearly with the number of disks and the number of clients, and the file system provides strict bandwidth guarantees for continuous media streams.