Creating optimal cloud storage systems
Effortless data storage in the cloud is gaining popularity for personal, enterprise and institutional data backups and synchronisation as well as for highly scalable access from software applications running on attached compute servers. The data is usually access-protected, encrypted and replicated depending on the security and scalability needs. Despite the advances in technology, the practical usefulness and longevity of cloud storage is limited in todays systems, which severely impacts the acceptance and adoption rates. Therefore, we introduce a novel cloud storage management system which optimally combines storage resources from multiple providers so that redundancy, security and other non-functional properties can be adjusted adequately to the needs of the storage service consumer. The system covers the entire storage service lifecycle from the consumer perspective. Hence, a definition of optimality is first contributed which is bound to both the architecture and the lifecycle phases. Next, an ontology for cloud storage services is presented as a prerequisite for optimality. Furthermore, we present NubiSave, a user-friendly storage controller implementation with adaptable overhead which runs on and integrates into typical consumer environments as a central part of an overall storage system. Its optimality claims are validated in real-world scenarios with several commercial online and cloud storage providers.
cloud storage online storage storage array storage ontology dispersion