Storage is an important issue in information technology, so this survey paper is timely. The paper looks at a detailed spectrum of integrity assurance techniques in the storage arena. The data sets that we are handling today are several orders of magnitude larger than data sets that were handled in past years; it is critical to ensure that this data remains accurate, and to capture anomalies if they exist.

Data can be corrupted by a variety of means, including hardware errors or malicious intrusions like virus attacks. This paper surveys such common violations. The paper then presents techniques to ensure the integrity of data, such as mirroring, redundant array of independent disks (RAID) systems, journaling file systems, and cryptographic file systems. The paper also goes into the applications of such systems, and various implementation choices.

From a survey point of view, this is a good starting point for anyone interested in getting up to speed on the state of the art in this field. The numerous references given along the way will help researchers and practitioners who want to learn more about a specific subject area. The authors also propose an integrity assurance technique called logical redundancy. However, it is not clear what the exact nature of the original contribution of the authors is in this area. The authors say that they are borrowing a method from the database field, and applying it to the storage integrity problem. The explanation, however, is not detailed enough, and does not contain any empirical results comparing its performance to other techniques. The paper’s main focus is its detailed survey of storage integrity issues. This is achieved nicely.