A Stochastic Model for File Lifetime and Security in Data Center Networks

TL;DR

This paper models file lifetime and security in data center networks using Markov processes, providing methods to evaluate how replication policies affect data longevity and security in large-scale infrastructures.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic model with a file d-threshold policy and develops Markov-based methods to assess file lifetime and security, enhancing understanding of data durability in data centers.

Findings

Effective evaluation methods for file lifetime in large-scale networks

Markov process models for data security assessment

Application of RG-factorizations for large network analysis

Abstract

Data center networks are an important infrastructure in various applications of modern information technologies. Note that each data center always has a finite lifetime, thus once a data center fails, then it will lose all its storage files and useful information. For this, it is necessary to replicate and copy each important file into other data centers such that this file can increase its lifetime of staying in a data center network. In this paper, we describe a large-scale data center network with a file d-threshold policy, which is to replicate each important file into at most d-1 other data centers such that this file can maintain in the data center network under a given level of data security in the long-term. To this end, we develop three relevant Markov processes to propose two effective methods for assessing the file lifetime and data security. By using the RG-factorizations, we show that the two methods are used to be able to more effectively evaluate the file lifetime of large-scale data center networks. We hope the methodology and results given in this paper are applicable in the file lifetime study of more general data center networks with replication mechanism.