Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Hakim Weatherspoon, Lakshmi Ganesh, Tudor Marian, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Ken Birman. ".Smoke and Mirrors: Reflecting Files at a Geographically Remote Location Without Loss of Performance". 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, February, 2009.

Abstract
The Smoke and Mirrors File System (SMFS) mirrors files at geographically remote datacenter locations with negligible impact on file system performance at the primary site, and minimal degradation as a function of link latency. It accomplishes this goal using wide-area links that run at extremely high speeds, but have long round-trip-time latencies—a combination of properties that poses problems for traditional mirroring solutions. In addition to its raw speed, SMFS maintains good synchronization: should the primary site become completely unavailable, the system minimizes loss of work, even for applications that simultaneously update groups of files. We present the SMFS design, then evaluate the system on Emulab and the Cornell National Lambda Rail (NLR) Ring testbed. Intended applications include wide-area file sharing and remote backup for disaster recovery.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather/publications/smfs-fast09.pdf

• HTML

  Hakim Weatherspoon, Lakshmi Ganesh, Tudor Marian, Mahesh
  Balakrishnan, Ken Birman. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/618.html"
  >.Smoke and Mirrors: Reflecting Files at a Geographically
  Remote Location Without Loss of Performance</a>, 7th
  USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies,
  February, 2009.

• Plain text

  Hakim Weatherspoon, Lakshmi Ganesh, Tudor Marian, Mahesh
  Balakrishnan, Ken Birman. ".Smoke and Mirrors:
  Reflecting Files at a Geographically Remote Location Without
  Loss of Performance". 7th USENIX Conference on File and
  Storage Technologies, February, 2009.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{WeatherspoonGaneshMarianBalakrishnanBirman09_SmokeMirrorsReflectingFilesAtGeographicallyRemoteLocation,
      author = {Hakim Weatherspoon and Lakshmi Ganesh and Tudor
                Marian and Mahesh Balakrishnan and Ken Birman},
      title = {.Smoke and Mirrors: Reflecting Files at a
                Geographically Remote Location Without Loss of
                Performance},
      booktitle = {7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage
                Technologies},
      month = {February},
      year = {2009},
      abstract = {The Smoke and Mirrors File System (SMFS) mirrors
                files at geographically remote datacenter
                locations with negligible impact on file system
                performance at the primary site, and minimal
                degradation as a function of link latency. It
                accomplishes this goal using wide-area links that
                run at extremely high speeds, but have long
                round-trip-time latencies—a combination of
                properties that poses problems for traditional
                mirroring solutions. In addition to its raw speed,
                SMFS maintains good synchronization: should the
                primary site become completely unavailable, the
                system minimizes loss of work, even for
                applications that simultaneously update groups of
                files. We present the SMFS design, then evaluate
                the system on Emulab and the Cornell National
                Lambda Rail (NLR) Ring testbed. Intended
                applications include wide-area file sharing and
                remote backup for disaster recovery.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/618.html}
  }
  

Posted by Jessica Gamble on 18 Mar 2009.
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