Abstract
The race of high-speed communications and high quality service provisioning is compelling the market to move towards less expensive and far reaching ways to provide services to the stakeholders. Evolution of distributed computing in consistency with extremely large networks abstracting the underlying equipments and protocols, leads the way into the world of concurrent access of available resources, at frequencies far higher than ever. Concurrency control, at present day, is being molded into a solution module called “Distributed Locking Manager” or commonly “DLM”, which is aimed to manage the concurrent access of resources while preventing network chaos. This paper is aimed to provide the reader a thorough insight into the functionality and evolution of the Distributed Locking Manager, from educational and development point of views. We present the reader with a generalized overview about the operation of DLM module. Apart from the fact that at present, different solutions for implementation of DLM are available in the market, the insight presented applies to all, in general. The vendor specific solutions differ in terms of attribute provisioning, levels of granularity or establishing communication for resource access, however, the main principles and core logics are intact in each of them. We describe the evolution of DLM from past to the present and reach some conclusions at the end of this paper which are quite essential for the integration of DLMs into distributed networks allowing for heterogeneous hardware functionalities and convergence of technology into large footprints.
Full Report: White Paper on Distributed Locking Manager
