A computer network is disclosed comprising a plurality of interconnected computer
devices including a plurality of disk drives for storing network data, each disk
drive comprising a head and a disk. The computer network comprises a plurality
of interconnected nodes, and a reservation facility for reserving resources within
the disk drives and the nodes to support a predetermined Quality-of-Service constraint
with respect to data transmitted between the disk drives through the nodes of the
computer network. In one embodiment, a switched node is disclosed comprising switching
circuitry having more than two bi-directional ports for simultaneously transmitting
data in multiple dimensions through a computer network, a disk for storing data,
a head actuated over the disk for writing data to and reading data from the disk,
and a reservation facility for reserving resources associated with data read from
the disk and written to the disk to support the predetermined Quality-of-Service
constraint with respect to data transmitted through the computer network.