Aishwarya Ganesan, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin—Madison
We analyze how modern distributed storage systems behave in the presence of file-system faults such as data corruption and read and write errors. We characterize eight popular distributed storage systems and uncover numerous bugs related to file-system fault tolerance. We find that modern distributed systems do not consistently use redundancy to recover from file-system faults: a single file-system fault can cause catastrophic outcomes such as data loss, corruption, and unavailability. Our results have implications for the design of next generation fault-tolerant distributed and cloud storage systems.
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author = {Aishwarya Ganesan and Ramnatthan Alagappan and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau},
title = {Redundancy Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance: Analysis of Distributed Storage Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions},
booktitle = {15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 17)},
year = {2017},
isbn = {978-1-931971-36-2},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {149--166},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast17/technical-sessions/presentation/ganesan},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}
