PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Efficient Consistency for Erasure-coded Data via Versioning Servers

Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-CS-03-127, April 2003.

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 the design, implementation and performance of a family of protocols for survivable, decentralized data storage. These protocols exploit storage-node versioning to efficiently achieve strong consistency semantics. These protocols allow erasure-codes to be used that achieve network and storage efficiency (and optionally data confidentiality in the face of server compromise). The protocol family is general in that its parameters accommodate a wide range of fault and timing assumptions, up to asynchrony and Byzantine faults of both storage-nodes and clients, with no changes to server implementation or client-server interface. Measurements of a prototype storage system using these protocols show that the
protocol performs well under various system model assumptions, numbers of failures tolerated, and degrees of reader-writer concurrency.

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

FULL PAPER: pdf / postscript