A Multi-criteria Approach for Large-object Cloud Storage

In the area of storage, various services and products are available from several providers. Each product possesses particular advantages of its own. For example, some systems are offered as cloud services, while others can be installed on premises, some store redundantly to achieve high reliability while others are less reliable but cheaper. In order to benefit from the offerings at a broader scale, e.g., to use specific features in some cases while trying to reduce costs in others, a federation is beneficial to use several storage tools with their individual virtues in parallel in applications. The major task of a federation in this context is to handle the heterogeneity of involved systems. This work focuses on storing large objects, i.e., storage systems for videos, database archives, virtual machine images etc. A metadata-based approach is proposed that uses the metadata associated with objects and containers as a fundamental concept to set up and manage a federation and to control storage locations. The overall goal is to relieve applications from the burden to find appropriate storage systems. Here a multi-criteria approach comes into play. We show how to extend the object storage developed by the VISION Cloud project to support federation of various storage systems in the discussed sense.