On Using Reliable Network RAM in Networks of Workstations

Abstract

File systems and databases usually make several synchronous disk write accesses in order to make sure that the disk always has a consistent view of their data, and that data can be recovered in the case of a system crash. Since synchronous disk operations are slow, some systems choose to employ asynchronous disk write operations, at the cost of low reliability: in case of a system crash all data that have not yet been written to disk are lost