PRECESION: progressive recovery and restoration planning of interdependent services in enterprise data centers

The primary focus of this paper is to design a progressive restoration plan for an enterprise data center environment following a partial or full disruption. Repairing and restoring disrupted components in an enterprise data center requires a significant amount of time and human effort. Following a major disruption, the recovery process involves multiple stages, and during each stage, the partially recovered infrastructures can provide limited services to users at some degraded service level. However, how fast and efficiently an enterprise infrastructure can be recovered depends on how the recovery mechanism restores the disrupted components, considering the inter-dependencies between services, along with the limitations of expert human operators. The entire problem turns out to be NP-hard and rather complex, and we devise an efficient meta-heuristic to solve the problem. By considering some real-world examples, we show that the proposed meta-heuristic provides very accurate results, and still runs ∼ 600 – 2800 times faster than the optimal solution obtained from a general purpose mathematical solver [1].