Boosting the Availability of Information Systems by Data Replication

The business of medium and large-sized enterprises is statically structured by branches settled in geographically distributed locations. Data replication in business services, such as remote database access where applications issue transactions, is a way to boost: • Information Availability. By storing redundant information at different sites makes data more available. • Performance. Applications need only to access their “closest” node for executing transactions. Hence, read-only transactions are specially benefitted by this approach as no interaction is needed with other nodes. • Failure Resilience. If a node crashes then applications accessing that node will be redirected to the remaining alive nodes. Two major obstacles need to be overcome when introducing replication:

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