Load Balance Properties of Distributed Data Layouts for Clustered MOD Servers

Large scale storage servers that provide location transparent, interactive access to hundreds or thousands of concurrent, independent clients will be important components of hte furture information super-highway infrastructure. Two key requirements of such servers are as follows: support high parallelism and concurrency in data access to allow large number of access to the same or different data. Second, support independent interactive playout control operations such as fast-forward, rewind, slow-play, pause, resume, random access etc. with minimal latency. This paper assumes a distributed storage server architecture consisting of several high performance storage nodes interconnected by a high speed desk area network into a cluster as a candidate architecture that can meet these two requirements. For such an architecture, we explore generalized distributed data layouts to satisfy the requirement of large number of scalable concurrent data accesses. We also quantify certain interesting properties of these data layouts that guarantee efficient implementation of interactive operations