A Low-Cost Multi-Failure Resilient Replication Scheme for High-Data Availability in Cloud Storage

Data availability is one of the most important performance factors in cloud storage systems. To enhance data availability, replication is a common approach to handle the machine failures. However, previously proposed replication schemes cannot effectively handle both correlated and non-correlated machine failures, especially while increasing the data availability with limited resources. The schemes for correlated machine failures must create a constant number of replicas for each data object, which often neglects diverse data popularities and does not utilize the resource to maximize the expected data availability. Also, the previous schemes neglect the consistency maintenance cost and the storage cost caused by replication. It is critical for cloud providers to maximize data availability (hence minimize SLA violations) while minimizing costs caused by replication in order to maximize the revenue. In this paper, we build a nonlinear integer programming model to maximize data availability in both types of failures, and therefore minimize the cost caused by replication. Based on the model’s solution for the replication degree of each data object, we propose a low-cost multi-failure (correlated and non-correlated machine failures) resilient replication scheme (MRR). MRR can effectively handle both correlated and non-correlated machine failures, considers data popularities to enhance data availability, and also tries to minimize consistency maintenance and storage cost. Extensive numerical results from trace parameters and experiments from real-world Amazon S3 demonstrate that MRR achieves high data availability, low data loss probability and low consistency maintenance and storage costs when compared to previous replication schemes.