Swift/RAID: A Distributed RAID

The Swift VO architecture is designed to provide high data rates in support of multimedia type applications in general-purpose distributed environ- ments through the use of distributed striping. Strþing techniques place sections of a single logical data space onto multiple physical devices. The original Swift pro- totype was designed to validate the architecture, but did not provide fault tolerance. We have implemented a new prototype of the Swift architecture that provides fault tolerance in the distributed environment in the same manner as RAID levels 4 and 5. RAID (Redun- dant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) techniques have recently been widely used to increase both performance and fault tolerance of disk storage systems. The new Swift/RAID implementation manages all communication using a distributed transfer plan ex- ecutor which isolates all communication code from the rest of Swift. The transfer plan executor is im- plemented as a distributed finite state machine that decodes and executes a set of reliable data-transfer op- erations. This approach enables us to easily investigate alternative architectures and communications protocols.

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