A Fresh Look at the Reliability of Long-term Digital Storage; apaper from the LOCKSS Research team

["Michael A. Keller" <Michael.Keller@stanford.edu>]

This is the LOCKSS research & development team's latest work; the paper to
be published is still in progress, but this tech report conveys the main
ideas.

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0508130

TITLE: A Fresh Look at the Reliability of Long-term Digital Storage
Authors: Mary Baker, Mehul Shah, David S. H. Rosenthal, Mema Roussopoulos,
Petros Maniatis, TJ Giuli, Prashanth Bungale

Abstract: Many emerging Web services, such as email, photo sharing, and
web site archives, need to preserve large amounts of quickly-accessible
data indefinitely into the future. In this paper, we make the case that
these applications' demands on large scale storage systems over long time
horizons require us to re-evaluate traditional storage system designs. We
examine threats to long-lived data from an end-to-end perspective, taking
into account not just hardware and software faults but also faults due to
humans and organizations. We present a simple model of long-term storage
failures that helps us reason about the various strategies for addressing
these threats in a cost-effective manner. Using this model we show that
the most important strategies for increasing the reliability of long-term
storage are detecting latent faults quickly, automating fault repair to
make it faster and cheaper, and increasing the independence of data
replicas.

Any comments, criticism, and/or suggestions will be gratefully received by
Vicky Reich ( vreich@stanford.edu ) .

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