Reliability and Availability Evaluation for Cloud Data Center Networks Using Hierarchical Models

• Main Authors: Tuan Anh Nguyen, Dugki Min, Eunmi Choi, Thang Duc Tran
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Data center network (DCN); reliability; availability; hierarchical modeling; reliability graph (RG); fault tree (FT)
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8604034/

Modeling a cloud computing center is crucial to evaluate and predict its inner connectivity reliability and availability. Many previous studies on system availability/reliability assessment of virtualized systems consisting of singular servers in cloud data centers have been reported. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical modeling framework for the reliability and availability evaluation of tree-based data center networks. The hierarchical model consists of three layers, including 1) reliability graphs in the top layer to model the system network topology; 2) a fault-tree to model the architecture of the subsystems; and 3) stochastic reward nets to capture the behaviors and dependency of the components in the subsystems in detail. Two representative data center networks based on three-tier and fat-tree topologies are modeled and analyzed in a comprehensive manner. We specifically consider a number of case-studies to investigate the impact of networking and management on cloud computing centers. Furthermore, we perform various detailed analyses with regard to reliability and availability measures for the system models. The analysis results show that appropriate networking to optimize the distribution of nodes within the data center networks can enhance the reliability/availability. The conclusion of this paper can be used toward the practical management and the construction of cloud computing centers.