Performance and Availability Tradeoffs in Replicated File Systems

Abstract

Replication is a key technique for improving fault tolerance. Replication can also improve application performance under some circumstances, but can have the opposite effect under others. In this paper we focus on a class of Grid applications long-running, compute-intensive, and write-mostly—and develop a calculus that takes into consideration the I/O characteristics of applications and failure behavior of distributed storage nodes to prescribe a file system replication strategy that maximizes the utilization of computational resources.