Realtime utilisation of cloud storage
Alistair Blair, Gerard P. Parr, Philip Morrow, Bryan Scotney, Aaron McConnell, Steve Appleby, Mike Nilsson · 2012
With the exponential growth of multimedia in todays Internet, Content Delivery Networks are seen to play a key role in the dissemination of multimedia content to the plethora of Internet enabled devices. It has been recognised that delivery networks are provisioned for peak demand, leading to prolonged periods of poor resource utilisation. The recent emergence of the cloud-computing paradigm as a commercial reality has created a proposition whereby content providers can outsource their distribution requirements to third party cloud providers when the need arises, ensuring high quality of service, while minimising costs. In previous work we proposed an Elastic Video Endpoint, a virtualised multimedia distribution point, which can utilise cloud resources to dynamically provision extra bandwidth in real time. Current cloud delivery systems commonly have pre-allocated storage that in many cases is over provisioned, in this work we present experimental results to demonstrate the ability of the proposed system to dynamically provision storage in real time to facilitate the efficient dissemination of multimedia content.