Harnessing the power of DHTs to build dynamic quorums in large-scale enterprise infrastructures

Abstract

Recently, enterprises owning a large IT hardware and software infrastructure have started looking at Peer-to-peer technologies as a mean both to reduce costs and to help their technical divisions to manage huge number of devices characterized by a high level of cooperation and a relatively low churn. Obtaining the complete and exclusive control of the system for maintenance or auditing purposes in these enterprise infrastructures is a fundamental operation to be implemented. In the context of classical distributed applications, quorum systems have been considered as a major building block for implementing many paradigms, from distributed mutual exclusion to data replication management. In this paper, we explore how to architect decentralized protocols implementing quorum systems in Distributed Hash Table based cooperative P2P networks. This paper introduces some design principles for both quorum systems and protocols using them that boost their scalability and performance. These design principles consist of a dynamic and decentralized selection of quorums and in the exposure and exploitation of internals of the DHT. As a third design principle it is also shown how to redesign quorum systems to enable efficient decentralization.