CoStore: A storage cluster architecture using network attached storage devices

The exponential growth of the Internet has presented numerous challenges to computer scientists and engineers. One of the major challenges is to design advanced storage systems to meet the demanding requirements for high performance, high capacity, and strong reliability.; This dissertation proposes the CoStore cluster architecture to construct reliable storage systems using network attached storage devices. The performance of a CoStore prototype has been measured and the preliminary results show that CoStore's performance is comparable to that of the efficient NFS and that the CoStore cluster architecture is highly scalable in terms of the cluster size.; This dissertation study investigates remote replication using CoStore clusters to construct highly reliable and highly available storage systems. It has been demonstrated that if a cluster is mirrored over the network with sufficient bandwidth and low latency, the remote replica cluster can considerably reinforce preparedness for disaster recovery without sacrificing performance.; This dissertation study also confirms the feasibility of deploying CoStore architecture to construct reliable storage service utilizing idle disk space on workstation clusters on existing desktop computing infrastructure.