Simplified Local Recovery for Wide Area File Systems
📜 Abstract
Wide area file systems must provide high availability despite the greater likelihood of network faults and server failures. Local recovery has been suggested as a means to improve failure recovery performance, but fully general local recovery is expensive to implement. Our goal is to strike a balance between the generality of a complete local recovery solution and the performance of an expensive, specialized system. We describe a method of parameterizing the recovery strategy to provide performance equivalent to a specialized solution, but general and low-cost enough to handle the full range of failure scenarios. Our strategy is log-based, allowing us to apply both traditional and speculative techniques on a per-committed-operation basis. Our tests show performance improvements of an order of magnitude for common use cases.
✨ Summary
This paper presents an innovative method for local recovery in wide-area file systems, aiming to enhance availability and recovery performance under various network faults and server failures. The authors propose a log-based strategy that allows for parameterized recovery, effectively balancing performance with cost-effectiveness and general applicability to different failure scenarios. The research demonstrates a substantial improvement in recovery performance through tests, showing improvements of an order of magnitude in common use cases.
The paper’s contributions to the field are notable in providing a recovery strategy that does not constrain versatility while maintaining low overhead, which is critical for large-scale distributed systems. This work has potentially influenced subsequent research in file system reliability and distributed storage systems, serving as a reference point for the design of robust, resilient file systems in academic and possibly industry contexts. However, a cursory search did not yield any specific research or industry resources explicitly citing this paper.