Cost-Based Automatic Recovery Policy in Data Centers

Abstract

Today's data centers either provide critical applications to organizations or host computing clouds used by huge Internet populations. Their size and complex structure make management difficult, causing high operational cost. The large number of servers with various different hardware and software components cause frequent failures and need continuous recovery work. Much of the operational cost is from this recovery work. While there is significant research related to automatic recovery, from automatic error detection to different automatic recovery techniques, there is currently no automatic solution that can determine the exact fault, and hence the preferred recovery action. There is some study on how to automatically select a suitable recovery action without knowing the fault behind the error. In this thesis we propose an estimated-total-cost model based on analysis of the cost and the recovery-action-success probability. Our recovery-action selection is based on minimal estimated-total-cost; we implement three policies to use this model under different considerations of failed recovery attempts. The preferred policy is to reduce the recovery action-success probability when it failed to fix the error; we also study different reduction coefficients in this policy. To evaluate the various policies, we design and implement a simulation environment. Our simulation experiments demonstrate significant cost improvement over previous research based on simple heuristic models.