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E-Commerce and E-Business

Multimedia Storage Servers
The latest advancement that has happened in the field of communication and technology has made it
possible and economical to access a variety of information sources such as, books, magazines, pictures,
video clips, and scientific data on the Internet. In order to give such services, multimedia storage servers
that are connected to customer sites should be provided with high-speed networks.
Due to some features of digital audio and video, considerable variation has been implemented to the
design of multimedia services. The features are:
1. Instantaneous Storage and Retrieval: Audio and video media are also referred to as “Continuous”
Media (CM), since they consist of a string of media quanta. Media quanta like video frames or
audio samples communicate the meaning only when accessed continuously in time. Moreover,
some media constituents whose playback is temporally coordinated are usually included in a
multimedia object.
2. Large Data Transfer Rate and Storage Space Necessity: The playback of digital video and audio
transfer data is at a very high speed. Hence, a useful mechanism has to be provided by multimedia
service for storing, recovering, and controlling data in vast quantities at high rates.
The design phase of such multimedia services includes some critical components. They are:
1. Multimedia storage servers that help in supporting constant revival of media information from the
storage subsystem.

2. Network subsystems that assure synchronous and proper delivery of media information to the
display sites.
3. Images, text, audio, and video are some of the multimedia objects. These multimedia objects can
be accessed with the help of multimedia storage servers. There is a difference in the design of such
servers as compared to the usual servers. This is because of:
(a) Real-time storage and retrieval needs.
(b) Huge storage space and data transfer rate requirements of digital multimedia.
Advancement in the field of communication and technology results in the growth of various
multimedia applications.

Interactive multiplayer games, distance education and online virtual worlds are
some of the kinds of multimedia applications.
The two main differences when compared to the usual applications are:
1. Multimedia applications provide storage, transmission, and processing of heterogeneous data
types, such as, text, image, audio, and video. The size, data rate, real-time requirements of these
heterogeneous data can be varied.
2. These applications require diverse performance requirements than conventional applications. For
instance, requirements concerning timeliness on the networks and operating systems.
E-Commerce Applications

It is a must for e-commerce applications to have certain capabilities to handle the activities involved in a
business. Accepting and managing payments, managing the checkout pipeline, and choosing, collecting
and distributing products to customers are some of the capabilities required. E-Commerce applications
are also used by companies to improve the online experience of customers and hence boost customer
traffic.

Did you know? IBM does business with more than 12,000 suppliers over the Web around the world.
IBM uses the Internet and Web technologies as its transaction-processing network,
such as, sending purchase orders, receiving invoices, and paying suppliers.

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