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1-2 Sun MediaCenter Server Administrator’s Guide • December 1997
■ a Content Manager (CM), which includes an RPC-based API that allows users to
move content between servers or between a server and a client.
■ Web-based tools that allow you to configure a Sun MediaCenter server, monitor
server operations, and transfer video content to a server.
The Sun MediaCenter server delivers MPEG bit streams at a constant bit rate. The
content of the streams are stored on an array of disks. The server guarantees that,
unless the server hardware fails, once a stream request is accepted, it will be
delivered at the specified constant bit rate until the stream ends or the server is told
to stop.
Using a Sun MediaCenter server, you can begin playing a stream within seconds
after storage of that stream on the server has started. This feature is called
“playthrough”.
The Sun MediaCenter server protects against single-disk failures by implementing a
parity mechanism similar to RAID Level 4 (Block-Interleaved Parity).
1.2 Sun MediaCenter Hardware
The Sun MediaCenter product line is built upon existing Sun hardware and
software. This provides you with excellent performance (especially in terms of cost
per stream) and flexibility in interfacing Sun MediaCenter servers to their
environment.
Each model of the Sun MediaCenter product line is designed to maximize input/
output throughput from the server’s disk subsystem through a network interface, to
an output device. Each model is equipped with a large amount of RAM, for
buffering streams and handling online content loading, and a large amount of disk
storage.
Within a disk subsystem, specific disk models are chosen for their appropriateness
for multimedia applications.
The Sun MediaCenter hardware architecture is shown in FIGURE 1-1.