Efficient Logging and Replication Techniques for Comprehensive Data Protection

Mariner is an iSCSI-based storage system that is designed to provide comprehensive data protection on commodity ATA disk and Gigabit Ethernet technologies while offering the same performance as those without any such protection. In particular, Mariner supports Continuous Data Protection (CDP) that allows every disk update within a time window to be undoable and local/remote mirroring to guard data against machine/site failures. To minimize the performance overhead associated with CDP, Mariner employs a modified track-based logging technique that unifies the long-term logging required for CDP and short-term logging for low-latency disk writes.