A Novel Hash Chain-Based Data Availability Monitoring Method for Off-site Disaster Recovery Architecture

Abstract

With the rapid development of mobile Internet, there is a higher demand for the real-time, reliability and availability of information systems and to prevent the possible systemic risks of information systems, various business consistency standards and regulatory guidelines have been published, such as Recovery Time Object (RTO) and Recovery Point Object (RPO). Some of the current related researches focus on the standards, methods, management tools and technical frameworks of business consistency, while others study the data consistency algorithms in the cases of large data, cloud computing and distributed storage. However, few researchers have studied on how to monitor the data consistency and RPO of production-disaster recovery, and what architecture and technology should be applied in the monitoring. Moreover, in some information systems, due to the complex structures and distributions of data, it is difficult for traditional methods to quickly detect and accurately locate the first error data. Besides, due to the separation of production data center (PDC) and disaster recovery data center (DRDC), it is difficult to calculate the data difference and RPO between the two centers. This paper first discusses the architecture of remote distributed DRDCs. The architecture can make the disaster recovery (DR) system always online and the data always readable, and support the real-time monitoring of data availability, consistency as well as other related indicators, in this way to make DRDC out-of-the-box in disasters. Second, inspired by blockchain, this paper proposes a method to realize real-time monitoring of data consistency and RTO by building hash chains for PDC and DRDC. Third, this paper evaluates the hash chain operations from the algorithm time complexity, the data consistency, and the validity of RPO monitoring algorithms and since DR system is actually a kind of distributed system, the proposed approach can also be applied to the data consistency detection and data difference monitoring in other distributed systems.