Dealing Efficiently with Data-Center Disasters

Frolund, Svend ; Pedone, Fernando

HP Development Company

关键词: reliability;    high-availability;    disaster recovery;    wide-area networks;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2000-167

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

High-end, mission-critical computer systems commonly guard against disaster. Such systems are composed of data centers (i.e., local-area networks of failure- independent computers) in distributed geographical locations, connected through wide-area network links. Wide-area network links are a major source of overhead, and to build efficient disaster-resilient protocols, their use should be reduced without compromising the overall reliability of the system. This paper claims that efficient disaster-resilient protocols can be devised by adequately modeling wide- area distributed systems. To support our claim, we define a model for wide-area distributed systems that distinguishes between data-center disaster failures and computer failures, and develop a hierarchical Atomic Broadcast protocol for this model. The main idea behind a hierarchical protocol is to run a local sub-protocol within each local-area network, and then use a global protocol to orchestrate the communication between the local protocols across wide-area links. The hierarchical nature of the protocol, and the accuracy of disaster detection, allows us to achieve disaster resilience with few messages across wide-area links. 25 Pages