Energy-efficient data replication in cloud computing datacenters

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that provides computing resources as a service over a network. Communication resources often become a bottleneck in service provisioning for many cloud applications. Therefore, data replication, which brings data (e.g., databases) closer to data consumers (e.g., cloud applications), is seen as a promising solution. It allows minimizing network delays and bandwidth usage. In this paper we study data replication in cloud computing data centers. Unlike other approaches available in the literature, we consider both energy efficiency and bandwidth consumption of the system, in addition to the improved Quality of Service (QoS) as a result of the reduced communication delays. The evaluation results obtained during extensive simulations help to unveil performance and energy efficiency tradeoffs and guide the design of future data replication solutions. © 2013 IEEE.