S. Sobti, N. Garg, C. Zhang, X. Yu, A. Krishnamurthy, and R. Y. Wang.
PersonalRAID: Mobile Storage for
Distributed and Disconnected Computers.
Proc. First Conference on File and Storage
Technologies. January 2002.
This paper presents the design and implementation of a mobile storage
system called a PersonalRAID. PersonalRAID manages a number of
disconnected storage devices. At the heart of a PersonalRAID system is a
mobile storage device that transparently propagates data to ensure
eventual consistency. Using this mobile device, a PersonalRAID
provides the abstraction of a single coherent storage name space that
is available everywhere, and it ensures reliability by maintaining data
redundancy on a number of storage devices. One central aspect of the
PersonalRAID design is that the entire storage system consists solely
of a collection of storage logs; the log-structured design not only
provides an efficient means for update propagation, but also allows
efficient direct I/O accesses to the logs without incurring
unnecessary log replay delays. The PersonalRAID prototype
demonstrates that the system provides the desired transparency and
reliability functionalities without imposing any serious performance
penalty on a mobile storage user.