IT Virtualization for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal #: CNS 11-39707 PI(s): Tsugawa, Mauricio; Figuereido, Renato J.; Fortes, Jose A. Institution: University of Florida Title: IT Virtualization for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery Project Proposed: This RAPID project, aiding the process of recovering Information Technology (IT) infrastructure damaged by catastrophic events, conducts research on the use of virtualization technologies to provide such aid. The work includes IT infrastructure needed to recover damages to non-IT infrastructures and human beings. Machine virtualization offers key mechanisms to move applications from one location (e.g., a data center) potentially affected by a disaster to another safe location. The project responds to many challenges such as: The - Inability to migrate Virtual Machines (VMs) from a disaster site to an unaffected site maintaining live services; - Severe limitation of power of network failures that limit the ability of performing live-migrations; - Need for coordination with recovery efforts to effectively prioritize critical services. Machine virtualization offers the ability to checkpoint VMs, thus enabling the creation of back-ups not only of data but also of partial application executions. VM checkpoints can be used to recover an IT infrastructure in a different location with minimal loss of data. The challenge lies in how to efficiently manage the massive amount of data and network traffic generated by the VM check-point process. With the main goals of keeping alive IT services as long as possible, and restoring recovery-critical IT services as quickly as possible during and after a disaster, the project focuses on - Analyzing data and events associated with damaged IT services due to the Great-East Japan Earthquake, - Studying scalability of wide-area VM live-migration and Back/checkpoint, and - Developing a resilient architecture to partial physical infrastructure failure in order to deploy IT infrastructures in virtualized and distributed datacenters. The investigators collaborate with Dr. Satoshi Sekiguchi, Director of the Information Technology Research Institute (ITIR) within the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AOST), an Institution under the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (MET), Japan. This group are experts in the area of virtualization and has had some interactions with the Florida group. Broader Impacts: The work develops an understanding of how well virtualized IT systems can cope with partial physical damages, of what changes in hardware, software, and general practice are needed, and how to determine the best way to adopt them. In the long term the project should enable informing the adoption of a virtualized datacenter to host essential IT services. Hence, the project is likely to enable informed decisions and should also contribute in graduate student education.