Network planning for disaster recovery

Disaster recovery and business continuity issues are becoming fundamental in networks since the importance and social value of digital data is continuously increasing. On the one hand, there is an obvious need of backing up data for resilience against major failures; in many situations the process of storing backup data is also enforced by the law. On the other hand, providing services that allow the migration of applications in real-time through virtualization techniques is becoming a mandatory feature in several business situations. In this paper we analyze the problems and the challenges of off-site data replication and virtual machine migration. In particular, we discuss the issue of optimizing network planning to support disaster recovery and business continuity. ILP (
Integer

Linear

Programming
) formulations for the optimization problem are presented with different objective functions. Heuristics are also proposed and analyzed taking into account both network cost minimization and fault recovery efficiency.