Robust Fault-Tolerant Majority-Based Key-Value Store Supporting Multiple Consistency Levels

The wide spread of Web 2.0 applications with rapidly growing amounts of user generated data, such as, wikis, social networks, and media sharing, have posed new challenges on the supporting infrastructure, in particular, on storage systems. In order to meet these challenges, Web 2.0 applications have to tradeoff between the high availability and the consistency of their data. Another important issue is the privacy of user generated data that might be caused by organizations that own and control data centers where user data are stored. We propose a large-scale, robust and fault-tolerant key-value object store that is based on a peer-to-peer network owned and controlled by a community of users. To meet the demands of Web 2.0 applications, the store supports an API consisting of different read and write operations with various data consistency guarantees from which a wide range of web applications would be able to choose the operations according to their data consistency, performance and availability requirements. For evaluation, simulation has been carried out to test the system availability, scalability and fault-tolerance in a dynamic, Internet wide environment.