DAC: Improving storage availability with Deduplication-Assisted Cloud-of-Clouds

Abstract With the increasing popularity and rapid development of the cloud storage technology, more and more users are beginning to upload their data to the cloud storage platform. However, solely depending on a particular cloud storage provider has a number of potentially serious problems, such as vendor lock-in, availability and security. To address these problems, we propose a Deduplication-Assisted primary storage system in Cloud-of-Clouds (short for DAC) in this paper. DAC eliminates the redundant data blocks in the cloud computing environment and distributes the data among multiple independent cloud storage providers by exploiting the data reference characteristics. In DAC, the data blocks are stored in multiple cloud storage providers by combing the replication and erasure code schemes. To better utilize the advantages of both replication and erasure code schemes and exploit the reference characteristics in data deduplication, the high referenced data blocks are stored with the replication scheme while the other data blocks are stored with the erasure code scheme. The experiments conducted on our lightweight prototype implementation show that DAC improves the performance and cost efficiency significantly, compared with the existing schemes.