Optimizing file availability in a secure serverless distributed file system
- 13 November 2002
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
Farsite is a secure, scalable, distributed file system that logically functions as a centralized file server but that is physically realized on a set of client desktop computers. Farsite provides security, reliability and availability by storing replicas of each file on multiple machines. It continuously monitors machine availability and relocates replicas as necessary to maximize the effective availability of the system. We evaluate several replica placement methods using large-scale simulation with machine availability data from over 50,000 desktop computers. We find that initially placing replicas in an availability-sensitive fashion yields pathological results, whereas very good results are obtained by random initial placement followed by incremental improvement using a scalable, distributed, fault-tolerant and attack-resistant hill-climbing algorithm. The algorithm is resilient to severe restrictions on communication and replica placement, and it does not excessively co-locate replicas of different files on the same set of machines.Keywords
This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- A component-based approach to reliability analysis of distributed systemsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2003
- Deceit: a flexible distributed file systemPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Towards an archival IntermemoryPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Large-scale simulation of replica placement algorithms for a serverless distributed file systemPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- A large-scale study of file-system contentsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1999
- FrangipaniPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1997
- Dynamic file migration in distributed computer systemsCommunications of the ACM, 1990
- The placement optimization program: a practical solution to the disk file assignment problemPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1989
- Weighted voting for replicated dataPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1979
- The protection of information in computer systemsProceedings of the IEEE, 1975