Fiber channel storage interface for video-on-demand servers
Shenze Chen, Manu Thapar · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
The emerging `information super-highway' and accelerating improvements in computer and mass storage technologies will soon make multimedia services, such as video-on-demand (VOD), a reality. Since a media server will be required to move a large amount of data over distribution networks, its I/O subsystem design is critical to its success. In this paper, we explore a new technology, Fiber Channel, as a storage interface for video servers. Specifically, we study Fiber Channel loop topology that attaches multiple disk drives to a server host. In order to compare the performance of the new Fiber Channel interface with existing parallel SCSI, we built a video server simulator that simulates the behavior of both interfaces. The results show that with the same number of disks and the same system configurations, one Fiber Channel loop can achieve 50% higher performance (measured by the number of concurrent streams supported by the server) than four fast/wide SCSI channels. Our results show that Fiber Channel is attractive as a video/media server I/O interface. We also analyze the buffer size requirements and I/O transfer size for various configurations.