High availability, scalable storage, dynamic peer networks: pick two

  • Authors:
  • Charles Blake;Rodrigo Rodrigues

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Laboratory for Computer Science;MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

  • Venue:
  • HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.02

Visualization

Abstract

Peer-to-peer storage aims to build large-scale, reliable and available storage from many small-scale unreliable, low-availability distributed hosts. Data redundancy is the key to any data guarantees. However, preserving redundancy in the face of highly dynamic membership is costly. We use a simple resource usage model to measured behavior from the Gnutella file-sharing network to argue that large-scale cooperative storage is limited by likely dynamics and cross-system bandwidth -- not by local disk space. We examine some bandwidth optimization strategies like delayed response to failures, admission control, and load-shifting and find that they do not alter the basic problem. We conclude that when redundancy, data scale, and dynamics are all high, the needed cross-system bandwidth is unreasonable.