High availability is not enough (distributed systems)

Abstract

The author mainly concentrates on transactional distributed systems. Most previous research on replication in such environments has concentrated in employing replication to achieve high availability. The position is that high availability along is not enough. First, it is important to consider the cost of providing high availability through replication. Second, one must exploit the potential of replication as a means of improving performance. Then performance issues (in addition to availability) in which one is mostly interested are: transaction latency, bottlenecks and throughput, and scalability (in particular as it affects the former issues). The author briefly outlines his related research efforts which can be classified in the following areas: replication-control protocols, recovery strategies, and studying availability in large-scale distributed systems.<>