Design of the PerDiS Transactional File System

We present the design for a fault-tolerant persistent data storage in a wide-area distributed cooperative engineering environment. We discuss some of the current options in file system design and, in particular, the relation between file mobility and transaction protocols. We believe that file mobility, and consequently coherence protocols, global file naming and versioning, are issues whose exploration and use will lead to improved transaction protocols and to an increased applicability of transactional file systems. Our aim is to implement a wide area distributed and fault tolerant file system in the context of the current PerDiS (Persistent Distributed Store) ESPRIT project[SHA97]. The emphasis of our design concerns is placed on improving the transactional and fault tolerant behavior of distributed file systems