Replication in Distributed Storage Systems: State of the Art, Possible Directions, and Open Issues

Large-scale distributed storage systems have gained increasing popularity for providing highly available and scalable services. Most of these systems have the advantages of high performance, tolerant to failures, and elasticity. These desired properties are achieved mainly by means of the proper adaptation of replication techniques. We discuss the state-of-art in replication techniques for distributed storage systems. We present and compare four representative systems in this realm. We define a design space for replication techniques, identify current limitations, challenges and open future trends.