Sumeet Sobti, Nitin Garg, Fengzhou Zheng, Junwen Lai, Yilei Shao, Chi
Zhang, Elisha Ziskind, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Randolph Y. Wang.
Segank: A Distributed Mobile Storage System.
Proc. Third Conference on File and Storage
Technologies. March 2004.
This paper presents a distributed mobile storage system designed for
storage elements connected by a network of non-uniform quality.
Flexible data placement is crucial, and it leads to challenges for locating
data and keeping it consistent. Our system employs a location- and
topology-sensitive multicast-like solution for locating data, lazy
peer-to-peer propagation of invalidation information for ensuring
consistency, and a distributed snapshot mechanism for supporting
sharing. The combination of these mechanisms allows a user to make
the most of what a non-uniform network has to offer in terms of
gaining fast access to fresh data, without incurring the foreground
penalty of keeping distributed elements on a weak network consistent.