Improving Fault Tolerance for High-capacity Shared Distributed File Systems using the Rotational Lease Under Network Partitioning
Byungchul Tak, Yon Dohn Chung, Myoung–Ho Kim · 2005
In the shared storage file system, systems can directly access the shared storage device through specialized data-only subnetwork unlike in the network attached file server system. In this shared-storage architecture, data consistency is maintained by some designated set of lock servers which use control network to send and receive the lock information. Furthermore, lease mechanism is introduced to cope with the control network failure. But when the control network is partitioned, participating systems can no longer make progress after the lease term expires until the network recovers. This paper addresses this limitation and proposes a method that allows partitioned systems to make progress under the partition of control network. The proposed method works in a manner that each participating system is rotationally given a predefined lease term periodically. It is also shown that the proposed mechanism always preserves data consistency.