Supporting Continuous Media: Is Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) Better Than SCSI?

Abstract

The existing SCSI parallel bus has been widely used in supporting multimedia applications. However, it may not fully utilize the aggregate throughput from disks in supporting continuous media because of its unfair bus accesses. The emerging serial interface, Serial Storage Architecture (SSA), provides high data bandwidth, fair accesses, and fault tolerance. The fairness algorithm in SSA ensures a fraction of data bandwidth is allocated to each disk. In this paper, we study the performance of SSA and SCSI in supporting continuous media. 1 Introduction A multimedia server should guarantee continuous display of video without jitters by allocating enough network bandwidth, memory, and storage resources. Because of the high bandwidth requirements, a multimedia server must have large storage capacity, high performance I/O, and network subsystems. Even though the existing SCSI parallel bus has been widely used for most of storage subsystems, unfair accesses on an SCSI bus may hinder with su..