Design of a Large Scale Data Stream Recorder

Abstract: Presently, digital continuous media (CM) are well established as an integral part of many applications. In recent years, a considerable amount of research has focused on the efficient retrieval of such media. Scant attention has been paid to servers that can record such streams in real time. However, more and more devices produce direct digital output streams. Hence, the need arises to capture and store these streams with an efficient data stream recorder that can handle both recording and playback of many streams simultaneously and provide a central repository for all data. We propose a design for a large scale data stream recorder. Our goal was to introduce a unified architecture that integrates multi-stream recording and retrieval in a coherent manner. The discussion raises practical issues such as support for multizone disk drives, variable bit rate media, and disk drives that have a different write than read bandwidth. We provide initial solutions for some issues while others will need to be investigated further.