CoStore: a serverless distributed file system utilizing disk space on workstation clusters

CoStore is a serverless distributed file system designed to provide cost-effective storage service utilizing idle disk space on workstation clusters. With all the system responsibilities evenly distributed across a group of collaborating workstations, the proposed architecture provides improved performance, reliability, and scalability. We have collected workstation uptime data from production systems. The assessment based on RAID reliability theory confirmed the feasibility of deploying CoStore on an existing desktop computing infrastructure. We have implemented a CoStore prototype and measured its performance. Preliminary results indicate that CoStore performance is comparable to that of commonly used distributed file systems, such as NFS, Samba, and Windows 2000 Server.