Applications in the future will need to
be much more aware of, and careful in
responding to, failures.
The high-performance computing
community accurately describes what
needs to be done:
“We already mentioned the lack of
coordination between software layers
with regards to errors and fault man-
agement. Currently, when a software
layer or component detects a fault it
does not inform the other parts of the
software running on the system in a
consistent manner. As a consequence,
fault-handling actions taken by this
software component are hidden to the
rest of the system. …In an ideal wor[l]
d, if a software component detects a
potential error, then the information
should propagate to other compo-
nents that may be affected by the error
or that control resources that may be
responsible for the error.” 7
In particular, as regards storage,
APIs should copy Amazon’s S3 by providing optional data-integrity capabilities that allow applications to perform
end-to-end checks. These APIs should
be enhanced to allow the application
to provide an optional nonce that is
prepended to the object data before
the message digest reported to the application is computed. This would allow applications to exclude the possibility that the reported digest has been
remembered rather than recomputed.
acknowledgments
Grateful thanks are due to Eric Allman,
Kirk McKusick, Jim Gettys, Tom Lipkis,
Mark Compton, Petros Maniatis, Mary
Baker, Fran Berman, Tsutomu Shimo-mura, and the late Jim Gray. Some of
this material was originally presented
at iPRES 2008 and subsequently published in the International Journal of
Digital Curation. 32
This work was funded by the member libraries of the LOCKSS Alliance,
and the Library of Congress’ National
Digital Information Infrastructure
and Preservation Program. Errors and
omissions are the author’s own.
Related articles
on queue.acm.org
Triple-Parity RAID and Beyond
Adam Leventhal
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1670144
hard Disk Drives: The Good, the Bad
and the Ugly!
Jon Elerath
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1317403
You Don’t Know Jack about Disks
Dave Anderson
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864058
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David S.h. Rosenthal has been an engineer in
silicon Valley for a quarter of a century, including as
a Distinguished engineer at sun microsystems and
employee #4 at nVIDIa. for the last decade he has been
working on the problems of long-term digital preservation
under the auspices of the stanford Library.
© 2010 acm 0001-0782/10/1100 $10.00