Multimedia resource management in OS/390 LAN Server

In a multimedia server, resource reservation is critical for guaranteeing jitter-free delivery of video. In this paper, we describe the resource manager component of the OS/390™ LAN Server (video server) that implements resource reservation. The resource manager functions can be divided into three categories: (1) the system management functions that allow arbitrary multimedia resources to be dynamically defined, undefined, and calibrated, and their capacities monitored remotely via the Simple Network Management Protocol, (2) the operational functions that allow video streams to reserve and release resources for supporting playback without explicit specification of the needed resources, and (3) the real-time data import function that places videos on the storage devices so as to balance the load among the devices after making the necessary space and bandwidth reservations. We finally discuss research issues to exploit economies of scale.