Hercules needs a highly efficient, fault tolerant and scalable Recorder Service for IP video recording, playback, and management. The Recorder Service will be responsible for joining multicast feeds and writing the streams (H264 over MPEGTS) to one or more file copies. For efficiency purposes, the service will have a bunch of disks at it's disposal and can allocate which recordings go where. Important: This is an idea generation contest. This is NOT a standard Architecture contest with standard deliverables and scorecard. Please read the specification below carefully and ask questions in the contest forum if you are not clear on what is expected for this contest We need architectural ideas on the Recorder Service: What kind of infrastructure, technologies, frameworks to re-use for efficiently implementing large data storage (more than 20 TB). How to implement a custom solution for simultaneous recording and retrieving of multiple files. How to achieve extremely high performance of the Recorder Service. The purpose of this contest is to generate several creative architectural ideas, based on the documentation provided and dialog with Hercules stakeholders on the forum. This is not a standard deliverable and anyone will be able to participate with or without competition experience. Everyone is encouraged to join. Please refer to the wiki spec for the full requirements: http://apps.topcoder.com/wiki/display/docs/Architecture+Idea+-+JITP+Recorder+Service+1.0+Specification Keywords: C++, Java, software, programming, contest, competitive, code, development, topcoder