Providing high availability using lazy replication

Abstract

To provide high availability for services such as mail or bulletin boards, data must be replicated. One way to guarantee consistency of replicated data is to force service operations to occur in the same order at all sites, but this approach is expensive. For some applications a weaker causal operation order can preserve consistency while providing better performance. This paper describes a new way of implementing causal operations. Our technique also supports two other kinds of operations: operations that are totally ordered with respect to one another and operations that are totally ordered with respect to all other operations. The method performs well in terms of response time, operation-processing capacity, amount of stored state, and number and size of messages; it does better than replication methods based on reliable multicast techniques.