SeWDReSS: On the design of an application independent, secure, wide-area disaster recovery storage system

Abstract

Distributed wide-area storage systems must tolerate both physical failure and logic errors. In particular, these functions are needed to enable the storage system to support remote disaster recovery. There are several solutions for distributed wide-area backup/archive systems implemented at application level, file system level or at storage subsystem level. However, they suffer from high deployment cost and security issues. Moreover, previous researches in literature only focus on any diskrelated failures and ignore the fact that storage server linked predominantly to a Wide-Area-Network (WAN) which may be unavailable or owing to network failures. In this paper, we first model the efficiency and reliability of distributed wide area storage systems for all media, taking both network failures and disk failures into consideration. To provide higher performance, efficiency, reliability, and security to the wide-area disaster recovery storage systems, we present a configurable RAID-like data erasure-coding scheme referred to as Replication-based Snapshot Redundant Array of Independent Imagef iles (RSRAII). We argue that this scheme has benefits resulting from the consolidation of both erasure-coding and replication strategies. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm to improve the snapshot performance referred to as SMPDP (Snapshot based on Multi-Parallel Degree Pipeline). We also extend this study towards implementing a prototype system, called as SeWDReSS, which is shown to strike a tradeoff between reliability, storage space, security, and performance for distributed wide-area disaster recovery. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.