Storage systems manage quotas to ensure that no one user can use more than their share of storage, and that each user gets the storage they need. This is difficult for large, distributed systems, especially those used for high-performance computing applications, because resource allocation occurs on many nodes concurrently. While quota management is an important problem, no robust scalable solutions have been proposed to date. We present a solution that has less than 0.2% performance overhead while the system is below saturation, compared with not enforcing quota at all. It provides byte-level accuracy at all times, in the absence of failures and cheating. If nodes fail or cheat, we recover within a bounded period.

In our scheme quota is enforced asynchronously by intelligent storage servers: storage clients contact a shared management service to obtain vouchers, which the clients can spend like cash at participating storage servers to allocate storage space. Like a digital cash system, the system periodically reconciles voucher usage to ensure that clients do not cheat by spending the same voucher at multiple storage servers. We report on a simulation study that validates this approach and evaluates its performance.