Title: A Stochastic Model for File Lifetime and Security in Data Center Networks,
Abstract: Data center networks are an important infrastructure in various applications
of modern information technologies. Note that each data center always has a
finite lifetime, thus once a data center fails, then it will lose all its
storage files and useful information. For this, it is necessary to replicate
and copy each important file into other data centers such that this file can
increase its lifetime of staying in a data center network. In this paper, we
describe a large-scale data center network with a file d-threshold policy,
which is to replicate each important file into at most d-1 other data centers
such that this file can maintain in the data center network under a given level
of data security in the long-term. To this end, we develop three relevant
Markov processes to propose two effective methods for assessing the file
lifetime and data security. By using the RG-factorizations, we show that the
two methods are used to be able to more effectively evaluate the file lifetime
of large-scale data center networks. We hope the methodology and results given
in this paper are applicable in the file lifetime study of more general data
center networks with replication mechanism.