Before revision: Contention at the storage nodes is the main cause of long and variable data access times in distributed storage systems . Offered load on the system must be balanced across the storage nodes in order to minimize contention, and load balance in the system should be robust against the skews and fluctuations in content popularities. Data objects are replicated across multiple nodes in practice to allow for load balancing. However redundancy increases the storage requirement and should be used efficiently. We evaluate load balancing performance of natural storage schemes in which each data object is stored at d different nodes  and each node stores the same number of objects.
After revision: To facilitate load balancing, distributed systems store data redundantly. We evaluate the load balancing performance of natural storage schemes in which each data object is stored at d different nodes and each node stores the same number of objects.