Cross-Partition Protocols in a Distributed File Service
Zheng Zhang, Christos Karamanolis, Mallik Mahalingam, Daniel A. Muntz · 2001
distributed file system, distributed namespace, fault tolerance, Storage Area Network (SAN) A number of ongoing research projects follow a partition-based approach in order to achieve high scalability for access to the distributed storage service. These systems maintain a namespace that references objects distributed across multiple locations in the system. Typically, atomic commitment protocols (e.g., 2-phase commit) are used for updating the namespace, in order to guarantee its consistency even in the presence of failures. Atomic commitment protocols are known to impose a high overhead to failure-free execution. In addition, they use conservative recovery processes and may considerably restrict the concurrency of overlapping operations in the system.