Decentralized Storage Consistency via Versioning Servers (CMU-CS-02-180)

This paper describes a consistency protocol that exploits versioning storage-nodes. The protocol provides linearizability with the possibility of read aborts in an asynchronous system that may suffer client and storage-node crash failures. The protocol supports both replication and erasure coding (which precludes post hoc repair of partial-writes), and avoids the excess work of two-phase commits. Versioning storage-nodes allow the protocol to avoid excess communication in the common case of no write sharing and no failures of writing clients.