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