Failures of all forms happen: from losing single network packets to site-wide disasters. Since businesses rely heavily on their data, it is imperative that failures require minimal time and effort to repair and that the service interruption during the failure or repair period should be as short as possible. To this end, the ideal system should repair itself, relying on humans only when absolutely necessary in the repair process. This paper describes one component of a self-healing storage system: the component that allows for automatic recovery of access to data when the power comes back on after a large-scale outage. Our failure recovery protocol is part of a suite of modular protocols that make up the Palladio distributed storage system. This protocol guarantees that service will be repaired quickly and automatically when enough failures are repaired.
Richard A. Golding, Elizabeth Borowsky