Online Web Storage Using Virtual Large-Scale Disks

As a result of the flood of data one of the major issues is how to store massive amounts of data. Although commodity hard disk drives (HDDs) are now very cheap, appliance storage systems are still very expensive. This led to the development of the VLSD (virtual large-scale disk) toolkit to construct large-scale storage using only inexpensive commodity hardware and software. We also developed a prototype large-scale storage system by collecting free PC disk space into a VLSD. The aim of conventional VLSD methods is to develop large-scale storage in local networks. However, it is difficult to develop larger scale storage than the conventional storage if only local resources are available. We have therefore, developed a prototype Web storage system to implement larger scale storage via the Internet. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the Web storage system.