A lamp lighting apparatus including a voltage control section for supplying a pulse voltage whose peak value rises stepwise, and a power conversion section for converting an output of the voltage control section into a high voltage and applying the high voltage to a lamp to light the lamp and for supplying, after the lamp is lit once, a self-sustaining discharge current to the lamp. A signal processor receives the visual data signal and is operable to identify a portion of the image in the dynamically captured graphic content responsive to the selection characteristic communicated by the pointer. Feature points on each of the vertical scan lines in each of the scene images are used to search for corresponding feature points on the corresponding vertical lines in other images. To assemble a set of replicated data storage units into a generational volume, the data storage unit metadata is rewritten to establish a unique data storage volume identity including information to associate the data storage volume in a lineage with the source data storage volume. During IO intensive processes, a \u201ccontent aware\u201d cache filter component of the server first accesses a cache structure in a content cache device to determine whether data blocks have been stored in the cache structure prior to requesting the data blocks from a networked disk array via a standard IO stack of the hypervisor. Also, given an undesirable MSC, the system determines whether the set of required MSCs implies the given undesired MSC.