A fibre channel-based architecture for Internet multimedia server clusters

Abstract

In this paper, we present a cluster architecture for Internet multimedia servers, which uses the Fibre Channel (FC) technology to overcome some of the shortcomings of existing architectures. We also explore the design issues of an FC-based multimedia server cluster. A significant advantage of the FC-based cluster is that it allows physical storage attachment to the interconnect. Because of this feature, FC-based clusters will change the fundamental data-sharing paradigm of existing clusters by eliminating remote data accesses in a cluster. Many aspects of this architecture are critical to real-time multimedia applications, such as audio and video services.