Object replication and cacheing have been used individually in distributed systems for many years. There are benefits from being able to support both: replication for availability, and cacheing for performance. Although both involve handling multiple copies of objects, there are sufficient differences between the two to make the design of an integrated approach a challenging exercise. In this paper, we describe a design that provides the benefits of both replication and cacheing by allowing both types of protocols to co-exist within the same application. We do not propose a new replication or cacheing protocol, but rather a way in which existing implementations can be combined.
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