Replication in the Harp File System
Name
MIT-LCS-TM-456.pdf
Size
6.78 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
abec321f5b950716925eb6fc6c5dde07
Author(s)
Liskov, B.
Ghemawat, S.
Gruber, R.
Johnson, P.
Shrira, L.
Williams, M.
Date Issued
August 1991
Series/Report no.
MIT-LCS-TM-456
Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of the Harp file system. Harp is a replicated Unix file system accessible via the VFS interface. It provides highly available and reliable storage for files and guarantees that file operations are executed atomically in spite of concurrency and failures. It uses a novel variation of the primary copy replication technique that provides good performance because it allows us to trade disk accesses for network communication. Harp is intended to be used within a file service in a distributed network; in our current implementation, it is accessed via NFS. Preliminary performance results indicate that Harp provides equal or better response time and system capacity than an unreplicated implementation of NFS that uses Unix files directly.
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