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• Acronym: SIVSS

Participants

• Xyratex
• Simula Labs
• Forth
• Glasshouse
• Hi-Stor
• O-Mass
• Thomson

Objective

Enterprises that are looking to provide new video-based applications for corporate communications, e-learning or other rich media applications face the challenge of running high bandwidth applications across existing infrastructures. This age old problem of bandwidth requirements vs. bandwidth cost is an especially big challenge for emerging applications and is limiting their wide spread deployment. The prime goal of the project is to create a new set of technology building blocks to enable an affordable content distribution network scalable from tens of Gigabytes to Terabits. This will enable the delivery of many new high-quality, rich media experiences to large numbers of users.

The networking of audio-visual information has a number of discrete implementations, typified by video servers used in video editing, video-on-demand distribution and archiving. A key requirement of all these networks is the ability to transmit large data files from one source to another. Most of these networks require the transmission of large files to many recipients (‘multicasting’), often at different times. This market has focused historically on the transmission of corporate video or movie clips to a wide number of users.

More recently, new initiatives have been started to create and make widely accessible National video archive material. The historic video content is first transferred from the original film and video tape origin to a digital medium and stored. This archive of culturally important digital information then needs to be connected to a high bandwidth network for wide spread distribution. Many initiatives, such as the “Prestospace” Integrated Project proposal, are focused on this specific application to ensure that our cultural video heritage is preserved and made accessible to all. The primary focus of that project is in the development of high level software applications to manage and catalogue such an archive so that the database structures can be searched and stored efficiently.

The scope of our SIVSS project is to provide a technology infrastructure capable of supporting such a large scale project. It will provide new technology building blocks which will enable the creation and wide spread deployment of affordable large scale rich media video networks.

Approach

The SIVSS project will develop and integrate a highly scalable switching fabric, capable of up to 1 Terabit of bandwidth performance. The near linear scaling to Terabyte performance will dramatically reduce the cost of large scale video distribution systems required by projects such as “Prestospace” and large scale security applications.

Specific attention will be placed on understanding the simulated operation and detailed reliability considerations of multi-switch network systems and their caching requirements. This will be the focus of Xyratex, Simula Labs, Forth and Glasshouse.

The project will also develop and integrate high density, high performance storage systems based around the emerging low cost SATA disk drive technology. This low cost

technology will be integrated into ultra dense packages to create a new paradigm of cost and performance for near line storage systems. This will enable large and affordable high performance storage caches to be deployed. This cache will be used to support all the real time interactions within the system.

Specific attention will be placed on controlling and enhancing the reliability and performance of the low cost disk drive technology. This objective will be the focus of Xyratex, Hi-Stor and Glasshouse.

The project will further integrate into the new network infrastructure a high density and high speed digital tape technology using a revolutionary magneto-optically controlled tape drive. The drive utilizes a massively parallel recording head technology which will deliver a significant increase in performance over conventional tape drives.

Data traffic streaming between low cost disk and high speed tape will be controlled by a new “data mover” controller. This will significantly reduce the load on the server for many high volume applications. This will be the focus of Hi-Stor, O-Mass, Xyratex and Glasshouse.

Integration of the high speed tape, data mover controller, SATA storage system and revolutionary new switch technology with video processing technology will allow the creation of systems capable of scaling to both the high bandwidth requirements for mass distribution of video and the real time requirements of the editing suite. This new technology will be a strategic requirement of all large scale video network deployment.