Atomicity, Serialization and Recovery in the Island-Based File System

We discuss the consistency protocol in the island-based file system [6], a cluster file system designed to provide highly available and scalable data storage to Internet applications. The goal of availability is to maximize the percentage of client requests that succeed despite the failure of one or more islands, the building blocks of the file system. A small portion of the directory system is replicated across islands to allow independent accesses to data in each island. As in any other systems where data replication and updates to replicated data are present, the island-based file system faces the challenge of keeping its replicated directory system consistent across islands.