Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm, which enables an on-demand and scalable provision of computing resources. Cloud computing is increasingly gaining industrial acceptance due to its flexibility, efficiency and its ability to reduce the costs for the Cloud users. Cloud computing provides an efficient solution for hosting non-critical IT services, but it does not yet meet the telecom and critical real-time applications requirements in terms of dependability and high availability. Major Cloud providers, such as Amazon, just ensure the availability of the virtual resources they are offering as a service. From the perspective of the Cloud tenants, the main concern is the high availability of their applications deployed in the Cloud. The first objective of this research project is to define a high availability solution that bridges this gap between the Cloud users' aspirations and the Cloud providers' offerings. In the context of Cloud computing, high availability imposes certain requirements that are conflicting with the Green computing, which aims at an efficient resource utilization and reduction of the environmental footprint of the Clouds. In particular, while high availability favors redundancy and the use of standby entities to eliminate single points of failures, Green computing encourages the consolidation of resources to maximize utilization. This introduces a multi-dimensional optimization problem. The second objective of this research project is to incorporate Green-awareness into the HA solutions defined to achieve the first objective.