ABSTRACT

Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-CS-02-180, September 2002.

Decentralized Storage Consistency via Versioning Servers

Garth R. Goodson, Jay J. Wylie, Gregory R. Ganger, Michael K. Reiter

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

This paper describes a consistency protocol that exploits versioning storage-nodes. The protocol provides linearizability with the possibility of read aborts in an asynchronous system that may suffer client and storage-node crash failures. The protocol supports both replication and erasure coding (which precludes post hoc repair of partial-writes), and avoids the excess work of two-phase commits. Versioning storage-nodes allow the protocol to avoid excess communication in the common case of no write sharing and no failures of writing clients.

KEYWORDS: Decentralized storage, consistency protocol, versioning servers, distributed file systems

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