Engineering Web Storage Servers Using Session Management

With the Web-based distributed file storage systems increasingly being used for file storage and sharing, there is a growing need to provide high level of availability and quality of services. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of introducing session management into layered distributed file storage systems. We improve the traditional client – Web server – storage server infrastructure by inserting session management layer into web servers. We also propose the strategy of leveraging session management to implement session migration and service continuation in a completely client-transparent fashion. Performance evaluation on the prototype implementation demonstrates that our approach is efficient and the overhead is reasonably small.