During this project NoSQL technologies for Hotel IT have been evaluated. It has been determined that among NoSQL technologies, document database fits the best this use-case. Couchbase and MongoDB, the two main documents stores have been evaluated, their similarities and differences have been highlighted. This reveals that document-oriented features were more developed in MongoDB than Couchbase, this has a direct impact on search of reservations functionality. However Couchbase offers a better way to replicate data across two remote data centers. As one of the goals was to provide a powerful search functionality, it has been decided to use MongoDB as a database for this project. A proof of concept has been developed, it enables to search reservations by property code, guest name, check-in date and check-out date using a REST/JSON interface and confirms that MongoDB could work for storing hotel reservations in terms of functionality. Then different experiments have been conducted on this system such as throughput and response time using specific hotel reservation search query and data set. The results we got reached our targets. We also performed a scalability test, using MongoDB sharding functionalities to distribute data across several machines (shards) using different strategies (shard keys) so as to provide configuration recommendations. Our main finding was that it was not necessary to always distribute the database. Then if "sharding" is needed, distributing the data according to the property code will make the database go faster, because queries will be sent directly to the good machine(s) in the cluster and thus avoid "scatter-gather" query. Finally some search optimizations have been proposed, and in particular how an advanced search by names could be implemented with MongoDB. / <p>This thesis is submitted in the framework of a double degree between Compiègne University Of Technology (UTC) and Linköping University (LiU)</p>

Desde sua criação, o Linux trouxe muita atenção ao movimento open-source, e à concreta possibilidade de se usar soluções de baixo custo em missões críticas. Nos últimos anos, esta possibilidade tornou-se real com a criação de vários clusters de alta disponibilidade. Atualmente, existem pelo menos 10 soluções de clusters open-source e mais de 25 comerciais. Cada um destes projetos teve uma abordagem diferente para o problema, embora todos tenham enfrentado dificuldades semelhantes. Se houvesse alguma padronização nesta área, esforços poderiam ter sido reaproveitados, e não duplicados. Neste contexto, o Open Clustering Framework (OCF) é um projeto open-source que visa definir um padrão para clusters em Linux. Um dos serviços mais importantes em um cluster é o serviço de pertinência. Ele é responsável por criar e manter o grupo, sendo assim importante para inúmeras aplicações. Sistemas de alta disponibilidade baseiam-se no serviço de pertinência para garantir o funcionamento dos recursos oferecidos por um cluster. Esta dissertação visa apresentar vários conceitos relativos a clusters, alta disponibilidade e serviços de pertinência. Com estes conceitos definidos, iremos implementar um serviço de pertinência, que será baseado no framework proposto pelo OCF, de maneira que esta implementação possa ser posteriormente incorporada a qualquer cluster que siga a especificação OCF. / Since its creation, Linux has brought attention to the open-source movement, and to the concrete possibility of using low cost solutions in critical mission systems. In the last years, this possibility has become real due to the creation of several high availability clusters. Today there are at least 10 open-source solutions and more than 25 commercial ones. Each one of these projects had a different approach to the problem, altought all of them had faced similar difficulties. If there was a standard in this area, efforts could be shared, and not duplicated. In this context, the Open Clustering Framework (OCF) is an open-source project that aims to define a cluster standard for Linux. One of the more important services in a cluster is the membership service. It is responsible for creating and maintaing the group. For this reason, it is important for many applications: high availability systems rely on this service to garantee the execution of the resources provided by a cluster. This thesis aims to present several concepts related to clusters, high availability and membership services. Having the concepts been defined, we will implement a membership service based on the OCF framework, in order to be able to incorporate this implementation in any OCF compliant cluster.

Cloud computing allows users to tap into a massive pool of shared computing resources such as servers, storage, and network. These resources are provided as a service to the users allowing them to “plug into the cloud” similar to a utility grid. The promise of the cloud is to free users from the tedious and often complex task of managing and provisioning computing resources to run applications. At the same time, the cloud brings several additional benefits including: a pay-as-you-go cost model, easier deployment of applications, elastic scalability, high availability, and a more robust and secure infrastructure. One important class of applications that users are increasingly deploying in the cloud is database management systems. Database management systems differ from other types of applications in that they manage large amounts of state that is frequently updated, and that must be kept consistent at all scales and in the presence of failure. This makes it difficult to provide scalability and high availability for database systems in the cloud. In this thesis, we show how we can exploit cloud technologies and relational database systems to provide a highly available and scalable database service in the cloud. The first part of the thesis presents RemusDB, a reliable, cost-effective high availability solution that is implemented as a service provided by the virtualization platform. RemusDB can make any database system highly available with little or no code modifications by exploiting the capabilities of virtualization. In the second part of the thesis, we present two systems that aim to provide elastic scalability for database systems in the cloud using two very different approaches. The three systems presented in this thesis bring us closer to the goal of building a scalable and reliable transactional database service in the cloud.

Cloud computing allows users to tap into a massive pool of shared computing resources such as servers, storage, and network. These resources are provided as a service to the users allowing them to “plug into the cloud” similar to a utility grid. The promise of the cloud is to free users from the tedious and often complex task of managing and provisioning computing resources to run applications. At the same time, the cloud brings several additional benefits including: a pay-as-you-go cost model, easier deployment of applications, elastic scalability, high availability, and a more robust and secure infrastructure. One important class of applications that users are increasingly deploying in the cloud is database management systems. Database management systems differ from other types of applications in that they manage large amounts of state that is frequently updated, and that must be kept consistent at all scales and in the presence of failure. This makes it difficult to provide scalability and high availability for database systems in the cloud. In this thesis, we show how we can exploit cloud technologies and relational database systems to provide a highly available and scalable database service in the cloud. The first part of the thesis presents RemusDB, a reliable, cost-effective high availability solution that is implemented as a service provided by the virtualization platform. RemusDB can make any database system highly available with little or no code modifications by exploiting the capabilities of virtualization. In the second part of the thesis, we present two systems that aim to provide elastic scalability for database systems in the cloud using two very different approaches. The three systems presented in this thesis bring us closer to the goal of building a scalable and reliable transactional database service in the cloud.

Enterprises today are dealing with extremely large amounts of critical digital information that continues to grow at an astonishing rate. On the other hand, storage software (firmware, middleware) and systems are becoming much more complex and existing failure recovery mechanisms are insufficient to handle the scale of these systems while meeting high availability and service quality expectations. In addition, the concurrent development and quality assurance processes, the large number of test scenarios and the large scale of these systems and services imply that failures will be the norm rather than the exception. Therefore achieving high availability and reliability in storage systems remains a major concern and an open research challenge. Most existing work in the domain of storage system availability addresses failures of the storage media (such as disks) and recoverability from these failures. However, failures at the firmware and middleware layers remain largely unaddressed. This dissertation research addresses these challenges in depth across different storage architectures. Concretely, we make the following contributions: First, we develop a recovery conscious framework for multi-core architectures and a suite of techniques for performing efficient fine-grained recovery (micro-recovery) in storage controller firmware that can be retrofitted into legacy code. The framework includes a task-level recovery mechanism, the Log(Lock) architecture that allows system state restoration during micro-recovery, and recovery-conscious scheduling algorithms that are designed to reduce the ripple effect of failure and improve recovery efficiency and system availability. Our second technical contribution addresses the storage middleware availability. We develop the notion of hierarchical middleware architectures by organizing critical cluster management services into a hierarchical overlay network, which separates persistent application state from global system control state and demonstrate significant improvement in the availability and reliability of enterprise scale storage systems. In addition, we develop the notion of operator reuse and a suite of reuse techniques to improve data availability. The key idea of operator reuse is to efficiently utilize system resources by exploiting reuse opportunities in both operators and persistent state of computing nodes. We demonstrate our design through STREAMREUSE, a reuse-conscious store-forward network of storage nodes, which offers distributed stream query processing services.

Thesis (M.T.S.C.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 105).

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The increasing number of users connected to the Internet led it to become a major vehicle for personal and business transactions in the last years. Nevertheless, its unavailability can result in losses, including nancial ones, for its users. Despite of all eorts to keep the network availability nearest to 100% of the time, reasearches have shown that the existing protocols have two algorithmic problems caused by message losses or disruption, named No Brain and Split Brain, which attack the network availability and lead it to crash. Thus, those researches propose that such protocols must be changed considering the possibility of message loss. In this way, this research species and implements the High Availability Router Protocol (HARP), which is a new high availability protocol that operates in stateless environments. Furthermore, a validation system is presented to test high availability protocols for the sake of link failures. The specication concerns to environment assumptions, services, vocabulary, format and procedure rules specied by nite state machine, moreover, the specication is complemented with a TLA+ formal description regarding concurrent systems context intending to ratify the HARP good properties. The HARP implementation consists of its prototyping on FPGA and the validation system based on a System-on-Programmable Chip (SOPC). / O crescente número de usuários conectados à Internet favoreceu que ela se tornasse um dos principais veículos de transações pessoais e empresariais nos últimos anos. Entretanto, sua indisponibilidade pode acarretar perdas, inclusive de caráter nanceiro, aos seus usuários. Apesar dos esforços empenhados para manter a rede 100% do tempo dispon ível, pesquisas apontam que os protocolos de alta disponibilidade apresentam problemas algorítmicos conhecidos como Acéfalo e Cérebro Partido, que são causados por perdas e erros de mensagens e levam à indisponibilidade da rede. Tais pesquisas propõem, então, que alterações sejam feitas nas especicações dos protocolos existentes considerando que mensagens podem não chegar a seus destinos conforme previsto. Em virtude disso, este trabalho especica e implementa um novo protocolo de alta disponibilidade, chamado High Availability Router Protocol (HARP), cuja operação acontece em ambientes sem preservação de estado. Adicionalmente, apresenta-se um sistema de validação para protocolos de alta disponibilidade que os testam segundo falhas nos canais de comunicação. A especicação do HARP concerne ao ambiente de operação, serviços, vocabulário, formato de mensagens e regras de procedimento especicadas através de máquinas de estados - nitos. Ademais, a especicação é complementada pela descrição formal em TLA+ e sua vericação no contexto de sistemas concorrentes para raticar as boas propriedades do protocolo. A implementação do HARP consiste da prototipagem em FPGA e o sistema de validação é baseado em um System on a Programmable Chip. / Mestre em Ciência da Computação

When designing networks intended to carry real-time media that is critical to arrive several aspects must be considered. For instance, the network must have redundant connectivity, should this traffic (and if so, how) be prioritized in networks where other traffic also travel, which technology is best in the given situation etc. This report will describe technologies that can solve these problems after which some of some of them will be tested in laborations to see how well they measure up in a given problem. The report establishes that in a self-governed LAN link aggregation in collaboration with Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol is a solid solution for providing redundancy with fast reconvergence. On WAN-connections and other shared networks Quality of Service rules should be implemented and in the case of Internet Service Providers a Service Level Agreement should be established.

Cloud computing provides access to on-demand computing resources and storage space, whereby applications and data are hosted with data centers managed by third parties, on a pay-per-use price model. This allows organizations to focus on core business goals instead of managing in-house IT infrastructure.                     However, as more business critical applications and data are moved to the cloud, service availability is becoming a growing concern. A number of recent cloud service disruptions have questioned the reliability of cloud environments to host business critical applications and data. The impact of these disruptions varies, but, in most cases, there are financial losses and damaged reputation among consumers.         This thesis aims to investigate the threats to service availability in cloud computing and to provide some best practices to mitigate some of these threats. As a result, we identified eight categories of threats. They include, in no particular order: power outage, hardware failure, cyber-attack, configuration error, software bug, human error, administrative or legal dispute and network dependency. A number of systematic mitigation techniques to ensure constant availability of service by cloud providers were identified. In addition, practices that can be applied by cloud customers and users of cloud services, to improve service availability were presented.

IT solutions must be protected so that the business can continue, even in the case of fatal failures associated with disasters. Business continuity in the context of disaster implies that business cannot continue in the current environment but instead must continue at an alternate site or data center. However, the BC/DR concept today is too fragmented, as many different frameworks and methodologies exist. Furthermore,many of the application-specific solutions are provided and promoted by software vendors, while hardware vendors provide solutions for their hardware environments. Nevertheless, there are concerns that BC/DR solutions often do not connect to the technical components that are in the lower layers, which function as the foundationfor any such solutions; hence, it is equally important to connect and map the requirements accordingly. Moreover, a shift in the hardware environment, such as cloud computing, as well as changes in operations management, such as outsourcing,add complexity that must be captured by a BC/DR solution. Furthermore, the integrated nature of IT-based business solutions also presents new challenges, as it isno longer one IT solution that must be protected but also other IT solutions that are integrated to deliver an individual business process. Thus, it will be difficult to employa current BC/DR approach. Hence, the purpose of this thesis project is to design, develop, and present a novel way of addressing the BC/DR gaps, while supporting the requirements of a dynamic IT environment. The solution reuses most elements fromthe existing standards and solutions. However, it also includes new elements to capture and present the technical solution; hence, the complete solution is designatedas a framework. The new framework can support many IT solutions since it will havea modular approach, and it is flexible, scalable, and platform and application independent, while addressing the solution on a component level. The new framework is applied to two application scenarios at the stakeholder site, and theresults are studied and presented in this thesis.