Pangaea: a symbiotic wide-area file system

ABSTRACT

Pangaea is a planetary-scale file system designed for large, multi-national corporations or groups of collaborating users spread over the world. Its goal is to handle people's daily storage needs---e.g., document sharing, software development, and data crunching---that can be write intensive. Pangaea uses pervasive replication to achieve low access latency and high availability. It creates replicas dynamically whenever and wherever requested, and builds a random graph of replicas for each file to propagate updates efficiently. It uses an optimistic consistency semantics by default, but it also offers a manual mechanism for enforcing consistency. This paper overviews Pangaea's philosophy and architecture for accommodating such environments and describes randomized protocols for managing large numbers of replicas efficiently.

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