Towards Federation and Interoperability of Cloud Storage Systems

While it is common to use storage in a cloud-based manner, the question of true interoperability is rarely fully addressed. This question becomes even more relevant since the steadily growing amount of data that needs to be stored will supersede the capacity of a single system in terms of resources, availability, and network throughput quite soon. The logical conclusion is that a network of systems needs to be created that is able to cope with the requirements of big data applications and data deluge scenarios. This chapter shows how federation and interoperability will fit into a cloud storage scenario. The authors take a look at the challenges that federation imposes on autonomous, heterogeneous, and distributed cloud systems, and present approaches that help deal with the special requirements introduced by the VISION Cloud use cases from healthcare, media, telecommunications, and enterprise domains. Finally, the authors give an overview on how VISION Cloud addresses these requirements in its research scenarios and architecture.

Storage Security and Technical Challenges of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has leaped ahead as one of the biggest technological advances of the present time. In cloud, users can upload or retrieve their desired data from anywhere in the world at anytime, making this the most important and primary function in cloud computing technology. While this technology reduces the geographical barriers and improves the scalability in the way we compute, keeping data in a Cloud Data Center (CDC) faces numerous challenges from unauthorized users and hackers within the system. Creating proper Service Level Agreements (SLA) and providing high-end storage security is the biggest barrier being developed for better Quality of Service (QoS) and implementation of a safer cloud computing environment for the Cloud Service Users (CSU) as well as for the Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Therefore, cloud applications need to have increased QoS and effective security measures and policies set in place to provide better services and to decline unauthorized access. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the cloud computing technology behind innovative business approaches and establishing SLA in cloud computing applications. This chapter provides a clear understanding of different cloud computing security challenges, risks, attacks, and solutions that exist in the present heterogeneous cloud computing environment. Storage security, different cloud infrastructures, the many advantages, and limitations are also discussed.

Commercial and Distributed Storage Systems

Distributed storage systems are becoming the method of data storage for the new generation of applications, as it appears a promising solution to handle the immense volume of data produced in today’s rich and ubiquitous digital environment. In this chapter, the authors first present the requirements end users pose on Cloud Storage solutions. Then they compare some of the most prominent commercial distributed storage systems against these requirements. Lastly, the authors present the innovations the VISION Cloud project brings in the field of Storage Clouds.

XtreemFS

Cloud computing poses new challenges to data storage. While cloud providers use shared distributed hardware, which is inherently unreliable and insecure, cloud users expect their data to be safely and securely stored, available at any time, and accessible in the same way as their locally stored data. In this chapter, the authors present XtreemFS, a file system for the cloud. XtreemFS reconciles the need of cloud providers for cheap scale-out storage solutions with that of cloud users for a reliable, secure, and easy data access. The main contributions of the chapter are: a description of the internal architecture of XtreemFS, which presents an approach to build large-scale distributed POSIX-compliant file systems on top of cheap, off-the-shelf hardware; a description of the XtreemFS security infrastructure, which guarantees an isolation of individual users despite shared and insecure storage and network resources; a comprehensive overview of replication mechanisms in XtreemFS, which guarantee consistency, availability, and durability of data in the face of component failures; an overview of the snapshot infrastructure of XtreemFS, which allows to capture and freeze momentary states of the file system in a scalable and fault-tolerant fashion. The authors also compare XtreemFS with existing solutions and argue for its practicability and potential in the cloud storage market.

Cloud Computing for Earth Observation

This chapter elaborates on the impact and benefits Cloud Computing may have on Earth Observation. Earth Observation satellites generate in fact Tera- to Peta-bytes of data, and Cloud Computing provides many capabilities that allow an efficient storage and exploitation of such data. Several scenarios related to Earth Observation activities are analyzed in order to identify the possible benefits from the adoption of Cloud Computing. As concrete proofs-of-concept, several activities related to Cloud Computing in the context of Earth Observation are exposed and discussed. Technical details are provided for a particular framework used by Earth Observation applications that has made the transition from using Grid services towards using Cloud services. A special attention is given to the avoidance of the vendor-lock-in problem.

Media Convergence and Cloud Technologies

Why do media organizations look out for cloud storage? In short, the media industry as a whole is facing various challenges. Due to digital convergence there is more material, less time, and multiple channels to fill, while budgets get smaller. TV, video on demand, and mobile content have become big drivers in pushing a search for innovative storage solutions. In addition to that, the opportunity to work with raw data, which can be used for deeper analysis, mapping, visualization, and personalized services is another aspect of why there is a need for novel storage solutions, preferably in the cloud. The media industry could lower production costs and increase speed to market of time critical reporting. This book chapter provides an overview of how far VISION Cloud can provide novel concepts for these demands.

Flashing in the Cloud

Data and storage systems are one of the most important issues to tackle when dealing with cloud computing. Performance, in terms of data transfer and energy cost, predictability, and scalability are the main challenges researchers are faced with, and new techniques for storing, managing, and accessing huge amounts of data are required to make cloud computing technology feasible. With the emergence of flash memories in mass storage systems and the advantages it can provide in terms of speed and power efficiency as compared to traditional disks, one must rethink the storage system architectures accordingly. Indeed, the integration of flash memories is considered as a key technology to leverage the performance of data-centric computing. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce flash memory storage systems by focusing on their specific architectures and algorithms, and finally their integration into servers and data centers.

Data Intensive Enterprise Applications

Today almost all big enterprises act globally, which results in a growing need for a new kind of data analytics. Imagine a company where data from distribution and sales needs to be combined with increasing online sales on multiple platforms and marketing across new social media channels. Here, new real-time analytics using Cloud Computing concepts can open new perspectives. SAP has had a strong presence in the Business Intelligence (BI) market. The company pioneered concepts to collect, combine, and analyze company wide information. As a result, SAP customers enjoy BI capabilities that are strongly integrated with their SAP operational systems (e.g., ERP, CRM). In recent years, companies have leveraged Cloud Computing as a means for lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of various types of business applications that are provided On-Demand. SAP already offers products such as SAP Business ByDesign, which is offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) On-Demand product. Feature-rich Cloud storage solution such as VISION Cloud enables SAP to integrate new innovations to its On-Demand software portfolio. This chapter describes how VISION Cloud enriches SAP’s Instant Business Intelligence analytical On-Demand service.

Compliance in the Cloud

Despite the huge economic, handling, and computational benefits of the cloud technology, the multitenant and geographically distributed nature of clouds hides a large crowd of security and regulatory issues to be addressed. The main reason for these problems is the unavoidable loss of physical control that costumers are forced to accept when opting for the cloud model. This aspect, united with the lack of knowledge (i.e. transparency) of the vendor’s infrastructure implementation, represents a nasty question when costumers are asked to respond to audit findings, produce support for forensic investigations, and, more generically, to ensure compliance with information security standards and regulations. Yet, support for security standards compliance is a need for cloud providers to overcome customers hesitancy and meet their expectations. In this context, tracking, auditing, and reporting practices, while transcending the compliance regimes, represent the primary vehicle of assurance for security managers and auditors on the achievement of security and regulatory compliance objectives. The aim of this chapter is to provide a roundup of crucial requirements resulting from common security certification standards and regulation. Then, the chapter reports an overview of approaches and methodologies for addressing compliance coming from the most relevant initiatives on cloud security and a survey of what storage cloud vendors declare to do in terms of compliance. Finally, the SIEM-based approach as a supporting technology for the achievement of security compliance objectives is described and, the architecture of the security compliance component of the VISION Cloud architecture is presented.

Cloud Access Control Mechanisms

Cloud storage systems provide highly scalable and continuously available storage services to millions of geographically distributed clients. In order for users to trust their data to these systems, they need to be confident that their data is secure. Thus, cloud services should implement an access control mechanism preventing unauthorized access and manipulation of their data. This chapter presents the existing access control mechanisms and describes their advantages and limitations in the Cloud set-up. The authors address the main access control aspects that include managing the identities and defining access policies. Furthermore, they describe more complex scenarios of identity federation and integration of separate identity silos which is required in various scenarios, like collaboration, merge on acquisition, or migration. For each topic, the authors present the existing solutions and describe the motivation for the architecture developed by the VISION Cloud project.