A Light-weight Data Replication for Cloud Data Centers Environment

Unlike traditional high performance computing environment, such as supercomputers, the cloud computing is a collection of interconnected and virtualized computing resources that are managed to be one or more unified computing resources. The Cloud environment constitutes a heterogeneous and a highly dynamic environment. Failures on the data centers storage nodes are normal rather than exceptional. As a result, the cloud environment requires some capability for an adaptive data replication management in order to cope with the inherent characteristic of the Cloud environment. In this paper, we propose a data replication strategy to adaptively select the data files which require replication in order to improve the availability of the system. Further, the proposed strategy decides dynamically the number of replicas as well as the effective data nodes for replication. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy behaves effectively to improve the availability of the Cloud system under study. Keywords— System Availability, Replication, Adaptive, Cloud Computing