BlueStar: A federation-based approach to building Internet-scale data centers

This paper describes the architecture and the implementation of BlueStar, which uses a federation-based approach to design and build Internet-scale data centers. Instead of aggregating all of the compute, storage, and network resources in a single data center, our approach uses the concept of a federation in which different-size data centers participate to provide the capacity needed to support Internet-scale applications. The main advantage of our approach is that due to the inherent geographic distribution of the data centers, applications can be easily provided with support for high availability, disaster recovery, and localized access (reduced latency). The approach also enables the service providers to realize benefits by deciding to locate the hosting of applications to take advantage of savings due to cost differentials between peak and off-peak hours, power rates, and cooling costs across data centers. Further, the approach enables individual data centers to maintain independence and operational control over their resources. We discuss the implementation of BlueStar using two sample composite applications: BlueMaps, a server-side mashup application (i.e., an application that provides data or functionality from more than one location), and Lotus (R) Connections, a collaboration application.