Storage intensive applications in the distributed environment

The rapid growth of the network infrastructure combined with the continuing reduction in the cost of storage is causing a fundamental shift in the delivery of information content, from physical to electronic means. Multimedia databases ranging well into the Terabyte range are currently not unusual, and applications in the Petabyte range can be envisioned in the future. Following an overview of the distributed storage system architecture and the requirements of some example storage intensive applications, this article describes the key SW and HW components, and some of the trade-offs required to provide the optimum solution.