Balanced and Efficient Data Placement and Replication Strategy for Distributed Backup Storage Systems

The traditional method of centralized backup suffers from single point of failure and scalability problem. It is therefore beneficial to carry out the backup service over geographically distributed networks. Hence, redundant copies of data stored in such networks are essential to ensure the availability and reliability of the backup data. The main objective of this work is to balance and evenly distribute large amounts of backup data for efficient use of disks as well as network bandwidth which leads to faster data access and recovery. We develop an efficient method for data placement and replication. Our method has several attractive features: (1) Balanced and efficient data placement in a distributed storage resource environment. (2) Redistributing as few replicas as possible in the event of storage node addition or failure/removal. (3) There is no central mapping table so that the search performance becomes more efficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through theoretical analysis and simulation results.