Optimizing Backup Resources In The Cloud

Cloud computing promises high performance and cost-efficiency; however, most cloud infrastructures operate at low utilization which greatly adhere cost effectiveness. Previous works focus on seeking efficient virtual machine (VM) consolidation strategies to increase the utilization of virtual resources in production environment, while overlooking the under-utilization of backup virtual resources. We propose a heuristic time sharing policy derived from the restless multi-armed bandit problem. The proposed policy achieves increasing backup virtual resources utilization while providing high availability. The experiment results show that the traditional 1: 1 backup provision can be extended to 1: M (M >> 1) between the backup VM and the service VMs, and the utilization of backup VMs can be enhanced significantly.