Dynamo: design, implementation, and evaluation of cooperative persistent object management in a local area network

In light of advances in processor and networking technology, especially the emergence of network attached disks, the traditional client‐server architecture of persistent storage systems has become suboptimal for many computation/data intensive applications. In this paper, we introduce a revised architecture for persistent object management employing network attached storage: the dynamic object server environment (Dynamo). Dynamo introduces two main architectural innovations: (1) to provide high scalability, the object management functions are mainly performed cooperatively by the clients in the system. Furthermore, data is transferred directly to the client's cache from network‐attached disks, thus avoiding copies from a disk to the server buffer and then over the network to the client. Other systems have an a priori assignment of ‘object management’ functions to specific nodes; (2) Dynamo uses a cooperative cache management which employs a decentralized lottery‐based page replacement strategy with a novel technique which attempts to put a page replaced from one node into the cache of another node which is likely to access the page in the near future. We show via performance benchmarks run on the Dynamo system and simulation results how this architecture increases the system's adaptability, scalability and cost performance. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.