The rapidly increasing storage and transmission capacities of computers, and the progress in compression algorithms, make it possible to build multimedia applications including audio and video. Such applications range from educational and training videos delivered to desktops in schools and enterprises, to entertainment services at home. Many applications have been developed for stand-alone personal computers. The applications can be deployed in distributed systems without change by using the client/server model and file servers. At the same time, the client-server The OS/390 LAN Server for MVS (MVS LAN Server, for short) is a high-performance file server that can support a very large number of clients with a variety of file server protocols. Multimedia serving requires additional features over a standard file server to allow uninterrupted delivery of video and audio to many clients. The large files and the high delivery bandwidth require special storage and performance considerations. Smooth delivery of video data also requires resource management and admission control. model supports sharing of applications among many users. The MVS LAN Server has been enhanced to support multimedia data delivery. It has built-in resource management and admission control, wide disk striping support in software to provide high data bandwidths, data placement algorithms to optimize the use of storage and bandwidth, and meta file support to store the information needed to manage the real-time delivery of video data. The performance enhancements include a new delivery mode with automatic pre-fetching of data, avoiding the copying of The MVS LAN...
By: Martin Kienzle, Robert Berbec, Gerald Bozman, Catherine Eilert (IBM System/390 Div., Poughkeepsie), Marc Eshel and Raymond Mansell
Published in: RC20432 in 1996
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