vDC: Virtual Data Center Powered with AS Alliance for Enabling Cost-Effective Business Continuity and Coverage

In the cloud computing era, cloud providers must design data centers that satisfy the requirements such as business continuity, coverage and performance, and cost-effectiveness for offering application providers the competitive hosting services. However, it is hard for even elephant cloud providers to satisfy these requirements all together because of the cost problem. In this paper, we propose the concept of virtual data center (vDC) of multiple geographically distributed data centers over the Internet to extend the coverage of hosting services in a cost-effective manner and apply the concept of AS alliance to ensure resilient connectivity of vDC to achieve high business continuity. We also introduce the detail design of AS alliance tailored for the vDC concept and conduct a feasibility study for making vDC connectivity robust.