A Survey of Secure, Fault-tolerant Distributed File Systems

Abstract: We survey four secure fault-tolerance distributed file systems: Farsite, OceanStore, Ivy, and Frangipani. We analyze each with respect to fault-tolerance, scalability, usability, maintenance overhead, and consistency. Finally, we present a taxonomy for such file systems based upon their failure models, update mechanisms, and data location schemes. One of the fundamental abstractions that a computer user expects is a file system. A file system provides an interface to the user where he can read, write, copy, and remove files. The most common file systems are the ones provided locally on a machine. The disadvantage of this approach is that if the machine fails, then all users of that file system will have lost all their data