ABSTRACT

Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-03-103, December, 2003.

A Protocol Family for Versatile Survivable Storage Infrastructures

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

Parallel Data Laboratory
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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

Survivable storage systems mask faults. A protocol family shifts the decision of which types of faults from implementation time to data-item creation time. If desired, each data-item can be protected from different types and numbers of faults. This paper describes and evaluates a family of storage access protocols that exploit data versioning to efficiently provide consistency for erasure-coded data. This protocol family supports a wide range of fault models with no changes to the client-server interface or server implementations. Its members also shift overheads to clients. Readers only pay these overheads when they actually observe concurrency or failures. Measurements of a prototype block-store show the efficiency and scalability of protocol family members.

KEYWORDS: survivable storage, protocol family, Byzantine fault-tolerance, atomic registers, erasure codes.

FULL PAPER: pdf / ps