A Reliable Storage Server for Distributed Cooperative Applications
P.-Y. Chevalier, Xavier Rousset de Pina · 1993
This paper describes the design of a reliable storage server. This server aims to provide cooperative applications running on top of a distributed object-oriented system with persistent reliable objects. Cooperative applications have two major requirements: reliability and consistency. In this paper, we show that such complex applications are not able to handle data inconsistencies. Hence guaranteeing object consistency despite node failure or network partition is one of the main issues that have to be solved. The design of our reliable storage server, called Goofy, was also mainly influenced by the underlying architecture of the system. The centralized support for object sharing and persistency led us to adopt a classical primary-backup scheme. The proposed design fulfils our main goals in terms of reliability and consistency while being very efficient as it asynchronously propagates updates and maximizes the locality of storage operations.