A novel discrete differential evolution based cost aware data redundancy scheme for cloud providers

Data availability is a desirable feature for all cloud providers. However, data reliability and disaster recovery cost are always two incompatible goals because adoption of data redundancy will bring incremental cost. The emergence and development of hybrid clouds provide a novel disaster recovery solution for all cloud providers. The option of moving data out of their own data centers and into other clouds is an excellent solution which should be taken into consideration. This paper introduces a proxy called hybrid clouds based storage proxy (HCS), which transparently spreads the storage load over many clouds both private and external. With help of HCS, a cloud provider is able to implement the data redundancy with lower cost by renting the virtual resource from external clouds. In order to guarantee the data availability with the minimal DR (disaster recovery) cost, a novel discrete differential evolution based cost aware data redundancy scheme is proposed for cloud provider. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs much better in DR cost and resource utilization compared with other data redundancy schemes.