Evaluation of a disaster recovery solution through fault injection experiments

Disasters can strike any time, anywhere, and most usually occur with little or no warning. Many small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) are not adequately prepared to handle a major outage. A potential solution is the the use of cloud computing to enable a disaster recovery solution for SMBs, alleviating the burden of allocating resources which would be used only in a catastrophic situation. This paper describes an experiment-based approach for studying the dependability of a disaster recovery solution supported by a private cloud. We employ fault injection to verify the benefits and drawbacks of such a solution during the design and early deployment phases. Dependability measures obtained in the testbed can be used to adjust specific components of the solution, to cross-check analytical and simulation models, as well as to give foundations for the definition of service level agreements with customers.