BIRDS: A Bare-Metal Recovery Systemfor Instant Restoration of Data Services

Abstract

We propose Birds: a bare-metal recovery system for instant restoration of data services, focusing on a general-purpose automatic backup-and-recovery approach to protect data and resume data services from scratch instantly after disasters. We design BIRDS to possess two appealing features: full automation in the backup-and-recovery process, and instant data service resumption after disasters. BIRDS achieves the former one with automatic whole system replication and restoration, by taking the backup process outside of the protected system with the help of a novel non-intrusive light-weight physical to virtual conversion method. The latter one is enabled by a novel pipelined parallel recovery mechanism, which allows data services being instantly resumed while data recovery between the backup data center and the production site is still in progress. We implemented a BIRDS prototype and evaluated it using standard benchmarks. We show that BIRDS outperforms existing disaster recovery techniques by the means of recovery efficiency while introducing relatively small runtime overhead. Furthermore, BIRDS can be directly applied to any existing system in a plug-and-protect fashion without requiring re-installation or any modification of the existing system.