Tiger Shark - A scalable file system for multimedia

Tiger Shark is a scalable, parallel file system designed to support interactive multimedia applications, particularly large-scale ones such as interactive television (ITV). Tiger Shark runs under the IBM AIX(R) operating system, on machines ranging from RS/6000(TM) desktop workstations to the SP2(R) parallel supercomputer. In addition to supporting continuous-time data, Tiger Shark provides scalability, high availability, and on-line system management, all of which are crucial in large-scale video servers. These latter features also enable Tiger Shark to support nonmultimedia uses, such as scientific computing, data mining, digital library, and scalable network file servers. Tiger Shark has been employed in a number of customer ITV trials. On the basis of experience obtained from these trials, Tiger Shark has recently been released in several IBM video-server products. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of Tiger Shark, discusses the experience gained from trials, and compares Tiger Shark to other scalable video servers.