Dynamic Replication Algorithm for Data Replication to Improve System Availability: A Performance Engineering Approach

Abstract

Information technology systems deployed by enterprises should not only fulfil their business functionalities but also cater to Quality of Service concerns such as Availability, Scalability, and Performance. To enhance the system performance, the system availability is an important factor and to improve the system availability, one of the strategies is replicating the frequently accessed data to multiple suitable locations which is a practical choice as the users can access the data from a nearby site. This is, however, not the case for replicas which must have a preset number of copies on several locations. How to decide a sensible number and right location for replicas have become an important issue in cloud computing. In this paper, we show a dynamic data replication strategy to enhance the performance of software system. To identify the suitable file to replicate and to decide respective number of replicas, we calculate popularity degree and replica factor. We use the fuzzy logic system to identify the system to place the replicas and we use the round robin method to place the replicas in the identified systems. We compare the performance of our technique with the existing technique.