An Efficient Commit Protocol Exploiting Primary-Backup Placement in a Distributed Storage System

摘要

Advanced data engineering applications require a large-scale storage system that is both scalable and dependable. In such a system, an atomic commit protocol becomes imperative to ensure the consistency and atomicity of transactions. In this paper we present a new commit protocol, BA-1.5PC, which is well tailored to such distributed storage environments as autonomous disks [20] that use a primary-backup storage schema. The protocol achieves an efficient commit process while also guaranteeing a high dependability by combining several approaches: (1) a low-overhead log mechanism that eliminates blocking disk I/Os, (2) removing the voting phase from commit processing to gain a faster commit process, and (3) a primary-backup assisted recovery strategy to enhance dependability in the presence of possible failures, so that a master failure in the decision phase will not block prepared cohorts of a transaction. Experiments were carried out on a trial version of an autonomous disks system to verify its efficiency. The results indicate that this protocol significantly outperforms several well-known commit protocols in terms of transaction throughput.