Lawrence A. Rowe, David A. Berger, and J. Eric Baldeschwieler
Computer Science Division - EECS
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1776
Email: Rowe@CS.Berkeley.EDU
Phone: 510-642-5117
This paper describes the the Berkeley Distributed Video-on-Demand (VOD) System
which is a hierarchical storage system designed to support transparent access
to thousands of hours of video material. The system architecture, shown in Figure
1, is composed of a database, one or more video file servers (VFS), and one or
more archive servers (AS). The database contains metadata and indexes about the
videos stored in the system. The VFS's stores videos on magnetic disks for real-time
playback. An AS manages a tertiary storage devices (e.g., optical disk or tape
jukeboxes). In essence, VFS is an on-line cache for videos permanently stored
on a tertiary storage (TS) device.