Assessing Redundancy Strategies to Improve Availability in Virtualized System Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modeling methodology using Stochastic Petri Nets to evaluate and compare redundancy strategies in private cloud file servers, demonstrating significant improvements in system availability.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for analyzing private cloud availability through SPN modeling of various redundancy configurations.

Findings

Redundancy at host and VM levels greatly enhances availability.

Modeling different configurations helps optimize system design.

The approach supports informed infrastructure decisions.

Abstract

Cloud-based storage platforms are becoming more common in both academic and business settings due to their flexible access to data and support for collaborative functionalities. As reliability becomes a vital requirement, particularly for organizations looking for alternatives to public cloud services, assessing the dependability of these systems is crucial. This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the availability of a file server (Nextcloud) hosted in a private cloud environment using Apache CloudStack. The analysis is based on a modeling approach through Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs) that allows the evaluation of different redundancy strategies to enhance the availability of such systems. Four architectural configurations were modeled, including the baseline, host-level redundancy, virtual machine (VM) redundancy, and a combination of both. The results show that redundancy at both the host and VM levels significantly improves availability and reduces expected downtime. The proposed approach provides a method to evaluate the availability of a private cloud and support infrastructure design decisions.