Enabling continued operation of IT services and infrastructures during floods and other disasters

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal #: CNS 12-40171 PI(s): Matsunaga, Andrea Fortes, Jose A. Institution: University of Florida Title: Rapid: Enabling Continued Operation of IT Services & Infrastructures during Floods & Other Disasters Project Proposed: Thi RAPID project, studying the effectiveness of virtualized Internet data centers on improving IT service continuity during and after a disaster through virtual machines (VM) live migration and backup/checkpointing, conducts research on the use of virtualization technologies. These technologies enable mitigating and recovering from the impact of catastrophic events on IT infrastructures and the services they deliver. Working with Thammasat University in Thailand, Internet Data Centers (IDCs) will be leveraged as disaster recovering sites, where government and corporate data can be backed up and operational servers can be temporarily located in order to provide high-availability and resiliency for the organizations? operations and services. The recent catastrophic events in the 2011 Thailand flood raised a many issues in the disruption of operation and services provided by various organizations that can contribute in handling other future catastrophic events. Several research questions have arisen: The - Need to assess existing infrastructures since suitable solutions have dependencies on the type of disasters and the realities of the IT environments in the disaster locations, and - Need to address challenges when migrating VMs across geographic locations, given that existing VM migration technology have been developed with local area network assumptions that do not hold true in disaster recovery scenarios. Thus, the work leverages existing infrastructure and experience in machine visualization technologies and cloud computing deployments to conduct realistic experiments, to assess the effectiveness of mechanisms offered by existing visualization technologies to maximize the availability of services and minimize costs to maintain and/or recover all the services during and after disaster. Research efforts will be developed in the following thrusts: - Collection and analysis of data related damaged IT services due to the 2011 Thailand Flood; - Studies of the nature of the IT services and their infrastructure design; - Studies of the practicality and scalability of VM live migration and backup/checkpointing in wide-area setting; and - Investigation of virtualized-based resilient middleware architectures for service continuity. Broader Impacts: This project will advance our understanding of how to provide robust middleware for protection and recovery of IT infrastructure that performs well for different types of disasters. It will also inform policy-makers and IT managers in Thailand and the USA on how to evaluate and integrate emerging commercial virtualization solutions for backup and/or recovery-oriented computing systems under the extreme conditions found during and after a disaster. The research supports a female minority PI and a US graduate student. The project has been submitted for co-funding from the Thailand Research Fund (TRF), which, if successful, would represent a precedent-setting partnership between the NSF and TRF which could be a model for future collaboration.