Minimal cost replicated file system with an availability constraint

In a replicated file system, copies of the same file are kept in different servers so that failures of some servers can be tolerant. The goal of a replicated file system is to increase the probability that an operation (read or write) can be performed, i.e., to increase the availability of the file. Giving a minimal acceptable availability of a file, the objective is to minimize the total cost required to build a replicated file system that satisfies the availability constraint. In this paper, an efficient algorithm is proposed to find the minimal cost replicated file system.