Towards Achieving a Highly Available Distributed File System

Achieving high availability is a premium goal for many distributed file systems. File replication is a well-known technique that is used to achieve this goal. It generally offers reduced client latencies and increases file availability. The objective of this paper is to achieve high availability of files through a novel intelligent replication method. To achieve this goal two algorithms are proposed, namely a primary replica assignment algorithm and an intelligent replica placement algorithms. The assignment algorithm uses an intelligent criteria based scheme to decide which one from a number of replicas to be assigned as the primary copy for a set of replicas. The placement algorithm also uses an intelligent criteria based scheme to decide on replication of files. The two algorithms have different criteria and the combined effect of both facilitate for higher availability of files within the distributed file system.