NFSv4 Replication for Grid Storage Middleware

Sharing data in scientific collaborations that involve many institu-tions around the world demands a large-scale storage system that is reliable and efficient, yet at the same time, convenient to use. This paper presents a replicated file system that supports mutable replication with strong consistency guarantees, high failure resil-iency, and good scaling properties. The principal concern with such a system is usually its performance penalty. Using experi-ment evaluation, we show that in simulated wide area networks, the proposed replicated file system maintains a significant per-formance advantage over a single server system. At the same time, it provides comparable and often better performance than GridFTP, the de facto standard file transfer application that is often used to manually synchronize shared data