Nowadays, large-scale Cloud-based applications have put forward higher demand for storage ability of data centres. Data in the Cloud need to be stored with high efficiency and cost effectiveness while meeting the requirement of reliability. While in current Cloud systems, typical 3replicas data replication strategies are applied for data reliability, in this paper we propose a novel cost-effective dynamic data replication strategy which facilitates an incremental replication method to reduce

more »

... storage cost and meet the data reliability requirement at the same time. This replication strategy works very well especially for data which are only used temporarily and/or have a relatively low reliability requirement. The simulation shows that our replication strategy for reliability can reduce the data storage cost in data centres substantially.