Redundancy Schemes for High Availability Computer Clusters

Abstract

Abstract:The primary goal of computer clusters is to improve computing performances by taking advantage of the parallelism they intrinsically provide. Moreover, their use of redundant hardware components enables them to offer high availability services. In this paper, we present an analytical model for analyzing redundancy schemes and their impact on the cluster's overall performance. Furthermore, several cluster redundancy techniques are analyzed with an emphasis on hardware and data redundancy, from which we derive an applicable redundancy scheme design. Also, our solution provides a disaster recovery mechanism that improves the cluster's availability. In the case of data redundancy, we present improvements to the replication and parity data replication techniques for which we investigate the availability of the cluster under several scenarios that take into account, among other things, the number of replicated nodes, the number of CPUs that hold parity data and the relation between primary and replicated data. For this purpose, we developed a simulator that analyzes the impact of a redundancy scheme on the processing rate of the cluster. We also studied the performance of two well-known schemes according to the usage rate of the CPUs. We found that two important aspects influencing the performance of a transaction-oriented cluster were the cluster's failover and data redundancy schemes. We simulated several data redundancy schemes and found that data replication offered higher cluster availability than the parity model.

Uptime-Optimized Cloud Architecture as a Brokered Service

“…Cloud Computing 1 , specifically Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), is a software-driven, algorithmic paradigm that supplies on-demand, pay-per-use compute capability with an upfront uptime assurance.…”

“…There have been many efforts such as [3] from the academia and from the practice over several decades to design high availability on computer systems that propose new or improved methods for failover clustering. Papers such as [1] propose redundancy models for high availability of computer clusters. The work by [6] describes a clustered architecture that increases availability of middleware components.…”

“…In this paper we propose a S. Sarkar has been partially supported by a research grant from Accenture Technology Labs, USA. 1 The NIST definition of cloud computing. Special Publication 800-145, 2011 Fig.…”

Performance Analysis of a Highly Available Home Agent in Mobile Networks

“…The mentioned solutions provide HA reliability (Bassek et al, 2006) through various ways such as HA redundancy (Wakikawa, 2009;Gay et al, 2009;Rathi and Thanuskodi, 2009;Lin and Yang, 2009) Distributed HAs in (McCarthy et al, 2009;Zhenkai et al, 2011Ayaz et al, 2009 or MN initiated recovery by using mechanisms such as "Home Address Regerneration" in (Lin and Yang, 2009). The time required for the recovery of HA varies as well between different solutions.…”