Scalable and transparent approach to media archive using digital object architecture
Tù Hoang, Lan Yang · Annual Simulation Symposium · 2013
The blooming age of the Internet and technology advancement in hardware and software infrastructure has introduced a major shift from text-based to media-based information, from static web pages or small text files to interactive media-rich representation. The exploding number of media files yield a challenge in storage, management and ownership; the rapid technology advancements impose potential integration and scalability problems. This paper proposes an architecture for media archival that supports scalability and transparency by adopting the components of Digital Object Architecture, a powerful open-source architecture for information management developed by Corporation for National Research Initiative. We design and deploy a small-scaled system on Windows Azure Cloud Service and fork a client application to demonstrate the interaction between clients and the system. We also mount several tests against the system to verify its functionality and measure its performance under increasing load. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of our architecture to support transparent media storage, access and management over a very long time frame, and also the ability to scale to handle large load. However, our results also indicate that the storage component yields low utilization rate due to non-optimal load-balancing mechanism.