Building Access Oblivious Storage Cloud for Enterprise

An enterprise uses VPNs, leased from a service provider, to interconnect multiple sites that are geographically apart. The service providers, as they start providing cloud-based services, are finding themselves well-positioned to providing storage services in the cloud for an enterprise, and make the service accessible through the existing VPN connections. Enterprise users, however, are used to fast, ubiquitous and guaranteed access to the storage from any enterprise location. This is achieved by having network attached storage (NAS) connected to the enterprise network. In order to maintain the same level of service, when the enterprise storage is moved into the cloud, the service provider must ensure that the storage is accessible from all the enterprise locations as if it is connected to the enterprise network itself, regardless of the actual user or the file. In this paper, we present a system that enables cloud storage service with guaranteed performance from all published access locations of an enterprise. Knowing only the limits on users access rates or their access bandwidth limitations, we develop an access oblivious storage provisioning and placement strategy. Our system uses a combination of chunking, data replication and intelligent data placement to guarantee performance to accessing the storage in an access independent manner without significant over-provisioning.