A Cost-Effective Mechanism for Cloud Data Reliability Management Based on Proactive Replica Checking

In current Cloud computing environments, management of data reliability has become a challenge. For data-intensive scientific applications, storing data in the Cloud with the typical 3-replica replication strategy for managing the data reliability would incur huge storage cost. To address this issue, in this paper, the authors present a novel cost-effective data reliability management mechanism named PRCR, which proactively checks the availability of replicas for maintaining the reliability. Their simulation indicates that, comparing with the typical 3-replica replication strategy, PRCR can significantly reduce the storage space consumption, hence storage cost in the Cloud.