Availability Modeling and Evaluation of Cloud Virtual Data Centers

Availability of the service delivered by cloud providers is one of the most important QoS factors of the service level agreements between providers and customers. Since current Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers use virtualization technology to manage data centers, virtual data centers (VDCs) have become a popular infrastructure for cloud computing. In order to study the service availability, a stochastic activity network (SAN) model is presented in this paper. The proposed SAN model can be appropriately used to investigate the impact of different characteristics and policies on service availability of VDCs.