A coherent distributed file cache with directory write-behind (1994)

by T Mann, A D Birrell, A Hisgen, C Jerian, G Swart
Venue:ACM Trans. on Computer Systems
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A Low-bandwidth Network File System

by Athicha Muthitacharoen, Benjie Chen, David Mazieres , 2001
"... This paper presents LBFS, a network file system designed for low bandwidth networks. LBFS exploits similarities between files or versions of the same file to save bandwidth. It avoids sending data over the network when the same data can already be found in the server's file system or the client ..."
Abstract - Cited by 394 (3 self) - Add to MetaCart
This paper presents LBFS, a network file system designed for low bandwidth networks. LBFS exploits similarities between files or versions of the same file to save bandwidth. It avoids sending data over the network when the same data can already be found in the server's file system or the client's cache. Using this technique, LBFS achieves up to two orders of magnitude reduction in bandwidth utilization on common workloads, compared to traditional network file systems
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Petal: Distributed Virtual Disks

by Edward Lee, Ramohan A. Thekkath - In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems , 1996
"... The ideal storage system is globally accessible, always available, provides unlimited performance and capacity for a large number of clients, and requires no management. This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of Petal, a system that attempts to approximate this ideal in pra ..."
Abstract - Cited by 361 (5 self) - Add to MetaCart
The ideal storage system is globally accessible, always available, provides unlimited performance and capacity for a large number of clients, and requires no management. This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of Petal, a system that attempts to approximate this ideal in practice through a novel combination of features. Petal consists of a collection of networkconnected servers that cooperatively manage a pool of physical disks. To a Petal client, this collection appears as a highly available block-level storage system that provides large abstract containers called virtual disks. A virtual disk is globally accessible to all Petal clients on the network. A client can create a virtual disk on demand to tap the entire capacity and performance of the underlying physical resources. Furthermore, additional resources, such as servers and disks, can be automatically incorporated into Petal. We have an initial Petal prototype consisting of four 225 MHz DEC 3000/700 work...
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Frangipani: A Scalable Distributed File System

by Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Timothy Mann, Edward K. Lee
"... The ideal distributed file system would provide all its users with coherent, shared access to the same set of files,yet would be arbitrarily scalable to provide more storage space and higher performance to a growing user community. It would be highly available in spite of component failures. It woul ..."
Abstract - Cited by 320 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
The ideal distributed file system would provide all its users with coherent, shared access to the same set of files,yet would be arbitrarily scalable to provide more storage space and higher performance to a growing user community. It would be highly available in spite of component failures. It would require minimal human administration, and administration would not become more complex as more components were added. Frangipani is a new file system that approximates this ideal, yet was relatively easy to build because of its two-layer structure. The lower layer is Petal (described in an earlier paper), a distributed storage service that provides incrementally scalable, highly available, automatically managed virtual disks. In the upper layer, multiple machines run the same Frangipani file system code on top of a shared Petal virtual disk, using a distributed lock service to ensure coherence. Frangipaniis meant to run in a cluster of machines that are under a common administration and can communicate securely. Thus the machines trust one another and the shared virtual disk approach is practical. Of course, a Frangipani file system can be exported to untrusted machines using ordinary network file access protocols. We have implemented Frangipani on a collection of Alphas running DIGITAL Unix 4.0. Initial measurements indicate that Frangipani has excellent single-server performance and scales well as servers are added.
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Separating key management from file system security

by David Mazieres, Michael Kaminsky, M. Frans Kaashoek, Emmett Witchel , 1999
"... No secure network file system has ever grown to span the In-ternet. Existing systems all lack adequate key management for security at a global scale. Given the diversity of the In-ternet, any particular mechanism a file system employs to manage keys will fail to support many types of use. We propose ..."
Abstract - Cited by 229 (28 self) - Add to MetaCart
No secure network file system has ever grown to span the In-ternet. Existing systems all lack adequate key management for security at a global scale. Given the diversity of the In-ternet, any particular mechanism a file system employs to manage keys will fail to support many types of use. We propose separating key management from file system security, letting the world share a single global file system no matter how individuals manage keys. We present SFS, a se-cure file system that avoids internal key management. While other file systems need key management to map file names to encryption keys, SFS file names effectively contain public keys, making them self-certifying pathnames. Key manage-ment in SFS occurs outside of the file system, in whatever procedure users choose to generate file names. Self-certifying pathnames free SFS clients from any notion of administrative realm, making inter-realm file sharing triv-ial. They let users authenticate servers through a number of different techniques. The file namespace doubles as a key certification namespace, so that people can realize many key management schemes using only standard file utilities. Fi-nally, with self-certifying pathnames, people can bootstrap one key management mechanism using another. These prop-erties make SFS more versatile than any file system with built-in key management.
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Exploiting Weak Connectivity for Mobile File Access

by Lily B. Mummert, Maria R. Ebling, M. Satyanarayanan , 1995
"... Weak connectivity, in the form of intermittent, low-bandwidth, or expensive networks is a fact of life in mobile computing. In this paper, we describe how the Coda File System has evolved to exploit such networks. The underlying theme of this evolution has been the systematic introduction of adaptiv ..."
Abstract - Cited by 197 (22 self) - Add to MetaCart
Weak connectivity, in the form of intermittent, low-bandwidth, or expensive networks is a fact of life in mobile computing. In this paper, we describe how the Coda File System has evolved to exploit such networks. The underlying theme of this evolution has been the systematic introduction of adaptivity to eliminate hidden assumptions about strong connectivity. Many aspects of the system, including communication, cache validation, update propagation and cache miss handling have been modified. As a result, Coda is able to provide good performance even when network bandwidth varies over four orders of magnitude -- from modem speeds to LAN speeds.

Shark: Scaling File Servers via Cooperative Caching

by Siddhartha Annapureddy, Michael J. Freedman, David Mazières
"... Network file systems offer a powerful, transparent interface for accessing remote data. Unfortunately, in current network file systems like NFS, clients fetch data from a central file server, inherently limiting the system’s ability to scale to many clients. While recent distributed (peer-topeer) sy ..."
Abstract - Cited by 105 (3 self) - Add to MetaCart
Network file systems offer a powerful, transparent interface for accessing remote data. Unfortunately, in current network file systems like NFS, clients fetch data from a central file server, inherently limiting the system’s ability to scale to many clients. While recent distributed (peer-topeer) systems have managed to eliminate this scalability bottleneck, they are often exceedingly complex and provide non-standard models for administration and accountability. We present Shark, a novel system that retains the best of both worlds—the scalability of distributed systems with the simplicity of central servers. Shark is a distributed file system designed for largescale, wide-area deployment, while also providing a dropin replacement for local-area file systems. Shark introduces a novel cooperative-caching mechanism, in which mutually-distrustful clients can exploit each others ’ file caches to reduce load on an origin file server. Using a distributed index, Shark clients find nearby copies of data, even when files originate from different servers. Performance results show that Shark can greatly reduce server load and improve client latency for read-heavy workloads both in the wide and local areas, while still remaining competitive for single clients in the local area. Thus, Shark enables modestly-provisioned file servers to scale to hundreds of read-mostly clients while retaining traditional usability, consistency, security, and accountability.

The Echo Distributed File System

by Andrew D. Birrell, Andrew D. Birrell, Andy Hisgen, Andy Hisgen, Chuck Jerian, Chuck Jerian, Timothy Mann, Timothy Mann, Garret Swart, Garret Swart , 1993
"... this paper describes how the Echo design and implementation set out to realize these properties, and our experience with the resulting system. A Distributed System Is Not Just a Network of Computers ..."
Abstract - Cited by 95 (8 self) - Add to MetaCart
this paper describes how the Echo design and implementation set out to realize these properties, and our experience with the resulting system. A Distributed System Is Not Just a Network of Computers
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Security for a High Performance Commodity Storage Subsystem

by Howard Gobioff, M. Satyanarayanan , 1999
"... and the United States Postal Service. The views and conclusions in this document are my own and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any supporting organization or the U.S. Government. ..."
Abstract - Cited by 44 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
and the United States Postal Service. The views and conclusions in this document are my own and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any supporting organization or the U.S. Government.
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Partially connected operation

by L. B. Huston, P. Honeyman, L. B. Huston, P. Honeyman - Computing Systems , 1995
"... RPC latencies and other network-related delays can frustrate mobile users of a distributed file system. Disconnected operation helps, but fails to use networking opportunities to their full advantage. In this paper we describe partially connected operation, an extension of disconnected operation tha ..."
Abstract - Cited by 37 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
RPC latencies and other network-related delays can frustrate mobile users of a distributed file system. Disconnected operation helps, but fails to use networking opportunities to their full advantage. In this paper we describe partially connected operation, an extension of disconnected operation that resolves cache misses and preserves client cache consistency, but does not incur the write latencies of a fully connected client. Benchmarks of partially connected mode over a slow network indicate overall system performance comparable to fully connected operation over Ethernet.
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Self-certifying File System

by David Mazieres , 2000
"... No secure network file system has ever grown to span the Internet. Existing systems all lack adequate key management for security at a global scale. Given the diversity of the Internet, any particular mechanism a file system employs to manage keys will fail to support many types of use. We propose ..."
Abstract - Cited by 33 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
No secure network file system has ever grown to span the Internet. Existing systems all lack adequate key management for security at a global scale. Given the diversity of the Internet, any particular mechanism a file system employs to manage keys will fail to support many types of use. We propose separating key management from file system security, letting the world share a single global file system no matter how individuals manage keys. We present SFS, a secure file system that avoids internal key management. While other file systems need key management to map file names to encryption keys, SFS file names effectively contain public keys, making them self-certifying pathnames. Key management in SFS occurs outside of the file system, in whatever procedure users choose to generate file names. Self-certifying pathnames free SFS clients from any notion of administrative realm, making inter-realm file sharing trivial. They let users authenticate servers through a number of different tech...