Multi-site data distribution for disaster recovery—A planning framework

• We describe a fault-tolerant multi-cloud data backup scheme using erasure coding.
• The data is distributed using a plan driven by a multi-criteria optimization.
• The plan uses parameters like cost, replication level, recoverability objective etc.
• Both single customer and multiple customer cases are tackled.
• Simulation results for the plans and sensitivity analyses are discussed.

In this paper, we present DDP-DR: a Data Distribution Planner for Disaster Recovery. DDP-DR provides an optimal way of backing-up critical business data into data centers (DCs) across several Geographic locations. DDP-DR provides a plan for replication of backup data across potentially large number of data centers so that (i) the client data is recoverable in the event of catastrophic failure at one or more data centers (disaster recovery) and, (ii) the client data is replicated and distributed in an optimal way taking into consideration major business criteria such as cost of storage, protection level against site failures, and other business and operational parameters like recovery point objective (RPO), and recovery time objective (RTO). The planner uses Erasure Coding (EC) to divide and codify data chunks into fragments and distribute the fragments across DR sites or storage zones so that failure of one or more site / zone can be tolerated and data can be regenerated. We describe data distribution planning approaches for both single customer and multiple customer scenarios.