Capacity Requirements of Video Servers in Broadcast Television Facilities

Digital video servers are being rapidly adopted in broadcast transmission facilities. In such a facility, new materials must be cached to these servers, usually from tape media or, possibly, from media in an archival system. To deal with the finite capacity of these servers (usually with hard disk media), old materials must be purged to free up space. In this process, materials of different time duration are handled. Increasingly, materials with different data rates are also handled because of the use of different compression standards, compression ratio, and (with the advent of HDTV) different uncompressed data rates and formats. Since the cost of video server storage is significant, understanding the time-dependent requirements of server storage capacity is important for system-level planning. A good understanding helps avoid wasteful provisioning of storage capacity without sacrificing operational flexibility. This paper presents a model which we believe is useful for planning or analyzing capacity requirements of video servers. We will examine implications of the model for systems handling primarily long form materials, such as near-video-on-demand applications.

Published

1998-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00275

ISBN

978-1-61482-929-4