Network Design Requirements for Disaster Resilience in IaaS Clouds

Many corporations rely on disaster recovery schemes to keep their computing and network services running after unexpected situations, such as natural disasters and attacks. As corporations migrate their infrastructure to the cloud using the infrastructure as a service model, cloud providers need to offer disaster-resilient services. This article provides guidelines to design a data center network infrastructure to support a disaster-resilient infrastructure as a service cloud. These guidelines describe design requirements, such as the time to recover from disasters, and allow the identification of important domains that deserve further research efforts, such as the choice of data center site locations and disaster-resilient virtual machine placement.