Customizable Fault Tolerance for Wide-Area Replication

Constructing logical machines out of collections of physical machines is a well-known technique for improving the robustness and fault tolerance of distributed systems. We present a new, scalable replication architecture, built upon logical machines specifically designed to perform well in wide-area systems spanning multiple sites. The physical machines in each site implement a logical machine by running a local state machine replication protocol, and a wide-area replication protocol runs among the logical machines. Implementing logical machines via the state machine approach affords free substitution of the fault tolerance method used in each site and in the wide-area replication protocol, allowing one to balance performance and fault tolerance based on perceived risk. We present a new Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol that establishes a reliable virtual communication link between logical machines. Our communication protocol is efficient (a necessity in wide-area environments), avo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SRDS
• Authors: Yair Amir, Brian A. Coan, Jonathan Kirsch, John Lane
• Keywords: Fault Tolerance, Logical Machine, SRDS 2007, Wide-area Replication Protocol