A Cloud Storage overlay to aggregate heterogeneous Cloud services

Abstract

Many Cloud services provide generic (e.g., Amazon S3 or Dropbox) or data-specific Cloud storage (e.g., Google Picasa or SoundCloud). Although both Cloud storage service types have the data storage in common, they present heterogeneous characteristics: different interfaces, accounting and charging schemes, privacy and security levels, functionality and, among the data-specific Cloud storage services, different data type restrictions. This paper proposes PiCsMu (Platform-independent Cloud Storage System for Multiple Usage), a novel approach exploiting heterogeneous data storage of different Cloud services by building a Cloud storage overlay, which aggregates multiple Cloud storage services, provides enhanced privacy, and offers a distributed file sharing system. As opposed to P2P file sharing, where data and indices are stored on peers, PiCsMu uses Cloud storage systems for data storage, while maintaining a distributed index. The main contribution of this work is to show the feasibility to store arbitrary data in different Cloud services for private use and/or for file sharing. Furthermore, the evaluation of the prototype confirms the scalability with respect to different file sizes and also shows that a moderate overhead in terms of storage and processing time is required. Abstract-Many Cloud services provide generic (e.g., Amazon S3 or Dropbox) or data-specific Cloud storage (e.g., Google Picasa or SoundCloud). Although both Cloud storage service types have the data storage in common, they present heterogeneous characteristics: different interfaces, accounting and charging schemes, privacy and security levels, functionality and, among the data-specific Cloud storage services, different data type restrictions. This paper proposes PiCsMu (Platform-independent Cloud Storage System for Multiple Usage), a novel approach exploiting heterogeneous data storage of different Cloud services by building a Cloud storage overlay, which aggregates multiple Cloud storage services, provides enhanced privacy, and offers a distributed file sharing system. As opposed to P2P file sharing, where data and indices are stored on peers, PiCsMu uses Cloud storage systems for data storage, while maintaining a distributed index. The main contribution of this work is to show the feasibility to store arbitrary data in different Cloud services for private use and/or for file sharing. Furthermore, the evaluation of the prototype confirms the scalability with respect to different file sizes and also shows that a moderate overhead in terms of storage and processing time is required.

Investigating Regulative Implications for User-generated Content and a Design Proposal

“…For example, in the global service mobility scenario by SmartenIT where data, which includes sensitive information, is exchanged via a number of hops over longer distances and perhaps is cached in between. PiCsMu deals with a variation of the aforementioned topic, because it is a file storage and file sharing application [22]. Here sensitive data is represented by file content itself and content owner information.…”

Efficient Data Integrity Verification Using CRC Based on HDFS in Cloud Storage

“…easy management and virtualization storage scheme. With the development of cloud storage technology [2] and the improvement of network bandwidth and reliability, more and more users can store data in the cloud server. However, the problem of data security [3] is still a major problem in cloud storage which can't be ignored.…”

Measuring interactivity and geographical closeness of Online Social Network users to support social recommendation systems

“…Several applications and systems integrate existing OSNs to the core of their solutions. E.g., PiCsMu [10] and Instagram integrate Facebook and Twitter, which enable the spreading of content to OSNs to build a collaborative system. Advantageous for integrating OSNs into an application is the collection of OSNspecific information for a Social Recommendation System (SRS).…”