Parallacs: Research in Storage and Compute Cloud Diversity

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The increasing popularity of cloud storage and cloud computing is leading organizations to consider moving data and computation out of their own data centers and into the cloud. However, success for cloud providers can present a significant risk to customers; namely, it becomes very difficult and expensive to switch providers. This research agenda will explore methods that allow cloud customers to diversify the set of cloud storage and cloud computing providers they use. Further, it will model, measure, and optimize the resulting more diverse systems. To diversify cloud storage, the research agenda includes investigating how to apply RAID-like techniques used by disks and file systems, but at the cloud storage level. By striping user data across multiple providers, customers can avoid vendor lock-in, reduce the cost of switching providers, and better tolerate provider outages or failures. A redundant array of cloud storage providers (RACS) acts as a proxy that transparently spreads the storage load over many providers. To diversity cloud computations, the research agenda investigates a data model and structure that allows computation to be sent to where the data is stored and performed directly on local data. This new diversified storage cloud and diversified compute cloud has the potential to return control back to the user for assurance on the integrity of data and computation, while still benefiting from the whole cloud paradigm.