Pond: the OceanStore Prototype

Sean Rhea
Patrick Eaton
Dennis Geels
Hakim Weatherspoon
Ben Zhao
John Kubiatowicz

The 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '03)
Best Student Paper Award

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Paper Abstract


OceanStore is an Internet-scale, persistent data store designed for incremental scalability, secure sharing, and long-term durability. Pond is the OceanStore prototype; it contains many of the features of a complete system including location-independent routing, Byzantine update commitment, push-based update of cached copies through an overlay multicast network, and continuous archiving to erasure-coded form. In the wide area, Pond outperforms NFS by up to a factor of 4.6 on read-intensive phases of the Andrew benchmark, but underperforms NFS by as much as a factor of 7.3 on write-intensive phases. Microbenchmarks show that write performance is limited by the speed of erasure coding and threshold signature generation, two important areas of future research. Further microbenchmarks show that Pond manages replica consistency in a bandwidth-efficient manner and quantify the latency cost imposed by this bandwidth savings.