Design of a Fault Tolerant Architecture for Private Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Objectives: Cloud computing has emerged as a cost-effective technology providing services to business-enterprise and IT industry. In this paper, we discuss a novel fault-tolerant scheme from an administration point of view that corresponds to implementation of Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) model based architecture for ensuring fault-tolerance in a private cloud infrastructure setup. Methods: After exploring various combinations of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) and Logical Volume Manager (LVM) techniques, we propose a novel idea of having a fault-tolerant architecture for cloud infrastructure. Findings: As an alternative to the existing cloud fault-tolerant techniques which use expensive and specialized shared storage system, local server disk pool will be used for storing VM images. This architecture provides a robust infrastructure built over Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) targets and software RAID. Application: This RAIN based model can be deployed over the existing cloud infrastructure. This storage model can be used by cloud toolkits to provide fault tolerant backend for storage.