Distributed data oriented centralized storage management in a scalable streaming media system

Streaming media is pervasive on the Internet now and continues to grow rapidly. The dramatic advances in both the capacity and cost-effectiveness of storage systems have made disk-based storage an increasingly attractive alternative for streaming media system. A large scale streaming media system may demand thousands of disks to satisfy both the bandwidth and storage capacity requirements imposed by thousands of concurrent clients. Distributed data storage is normally adopted to improve the performance and scalability. Unfortunately, an effective storage management mechanism for a large scale distributed streaming media system presents several research challenges. This paper designs and implements a highly reliable and available Distributed Data Oriented Storage Management (DDOSM) mechanism in a scalable streaming media system. All heterogeneous storage resources across the system are aggregated as a single logical view which strikes a good balance between a distributed data storage and centralized storage management. The centralized management of all physical and logical storage resources dramatically simplifies the storage administration as the size and complexity of the streaming media system grows. Fault tolerance and dynamic load balance at the disk level and system level are achieved to provide high reliability and availability due to the DDOSM.