CDRM: A Cost-Effective Dynamic Replication Management Scheme for Cloud Storage Cluster

Data replication has been widely used as a mean of increasing the data availability of large-scale cloud storage systems where failures are normal. Aiming to provide cost-effective availability, and improve performance and load-balancing of cloud storage, this paper presents a cost-effective dynamic replication management scheme referred to as CDRM. A novel model is proposed to capture the relationship between availability and replica number. CDRM leverages this model to calculate and maintain minimal replica number for a given availability requirement. Replica placement is based on capacity and blocking probability of data nodes. By adjusting replica number and location according to workload changing and node capacity, CDRM can dynamically redistribute workloads among data nodes in the heterogeneous cloud. We implemented CDRM in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and experiment results conclusively demonstrate that our CDRM is cost effective and outperforms default replication management of HDFS in terms of performance and load balancing for large-scale cloud storage.