On the Impact of Replica Placement to the Reliability of Distributed Brick Storage Systems

Data reliability of distributed brick storage systems critically depends on the replica placement policy, and the two governing forces are repair speed and sensitivity to multiple concurrent failures. In this paper, the authors provided an analytical framework to reason and quantify the impact of replica placement policy to system reliability. The novelty of the framework is its consideration of the bounded network bandwidth for data maintenance. The framework was applied to two popular schemes, namely sequential placement and random placement, and showed that both have drawbacks that significantly degrade data reliability. Then the stripe placement scheme was proposed and find the near-optimal configuration parameter such that it provides much better reliability. The possibility of addressing the problem of correlated brick failures in the analytical framework was further discussed