Co-store: a distributed cooperative storage mechanism

Computerized data are becoming critical to the survival of an enterprise. RAID is a popular mechanism to offer fault-tolerance storage. However, RAID cannot work well when two more disks fail and the distance it can reach is very limited. This paper presents a novel distributed cooperative fault-tolerance storage mechanism: co-store. Co-store consolidates disk space of individual node into a single storage spool and implements file-sharing and fault-tolerance through the cooperation of the nodes, in which a node provides as well as shares service. In co-store, file is stored in form of original file fragments and their XOR verification fragments are among the nodes of the network. File is available even when a part of nodes fail. The experiments in this paper show that co-store can offer high fault-tolerance and advanced performance storage service.