In contrast to specialized video servers, advanced multimedia applications for tele-shopping, tele-teaching and news-on-demand exhibit a mixed workload with massive access to conventional, "discrete" data such as text document, images and indexes as well as requests for "continuous data" such as video. The paper briefly describes the prototype of a multimedia information server that stores discrete and continuous data on a shared disk pool and is able to handle a mixed workload in a very efficient way.

Most multimedia applications require storage and retrieval of large amounts of continuous and discrete data at very high rates. Disk drives should be servicing such mixed workloads achieving low response times for discrete requests, while guaranteeing the uninterrupted delivery of continuous data. Disk scheduling algorithms for mixed workloads, although they play a central role in this task, have been overlooked by related multimedia research efforts, which so far have mostly concentrated on the scheduling of continuous requests only. The focus of this paper is on efficient disk I/O scheduling algorithms for mixed workloads in a multimedia storage server. We propose novel algorithms, a taxonomy of relevant algorithms, and study their performance through experimentation. Our results show that our proposed algorithms offer drastic improvements in discrete request average response times, low response-time variability, while serving continuous requests without interruptions.

Article Free Access Share on Stochastic service guarantees for continuous data on multi-zone disks Authors: Guido Nerjes Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Institute of Information Systems, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Institute of Information Systems, CH-8092 Zurich, SwitzerlandView Profile , Peter Muth University of the Saarland, Department of Computer Science, D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany University of the Saarland, Department of Computer Science, D-66041 Saarbrücken, GermanyView Profile , Gerhard Weikum University of the Saarland, Department of Computer Science, D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany University of the Saarland, Department of Computer Science, D-66041 Saarbrücken, GermanyView Profile Authors Info & Claims PODS '97: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systemsMay 1997 Pages 154–160https://doi.org/10.1145/263661.263679Published:01 May 1997Publication History 21citation276DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations21Total Downloads276Last 12 Months8Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF