Replication Strategy with Comprehensive Data Center Selection Method in Cloud Environments

Abstract

As the amount of data continues to grow rapidly, the variety of data produced by applications is becoming more affluent than ever. Cloud computing is the best technology evolving today to provide multi-services for the mass and variety of data. The cloud computing features are capable of processing, managing, and storing all sorts of data. Although data is stored in many high-end nodes, either in the same data centers or across many data centers in cloud, performance issues are still inevitable. The cloud replication strategy is one of best solutions to address risk of performance degradation in the cloud environment. The real challenge here is developing the right data replication strategy with minimal data movement that guarantees efficient network usage, low fault tolerance, and minimal replication frequency. The key problem discussed in this research is inefficient network usage discovered during selecting a suitable data center to store replica copies induced by inadequate data center selection criteria. Hence, to mitigate the issue, we proposed Replication Strategy with a comprehensive Data Center Selection Method (RS-DCSM), which can determine the appropriate data center to place replicas by considering three key factors: Popularity, space availability, and centrality. The proposed RS-DCSM was simulated using CloudSim and the results proved that data movement between data centers is significantly reduced by 14% reduction in overall replication frequency and 20% decrement in network usage, which outperformed the current replication strategy, known as Dynamic Popularity aware Replication Strategy (DPRS) algorithm.