Designing a Secure, Scalable, and Cost-Effective Cloud Storage Solution: A Novel Approach to Data Management Using NextCloud, TrueNAS, and QEMU/KVM

This paper presents a novel approach to cloud storage challenges by integrating NextCloud, TrueNAS, and QEMU/KVM. Our research demonstrates how this combination creates a robust, flexible, and economical cloud storage system suitable for various applications. We detail the architecture, highlighting TrueNAS's ZFS-based storage, QEMU/KVM's virtualization, and NextCloud's user interface. Extensive testing shows superior data integrity and protection compared to traditional solutions. Performance benchmarks reveal high read/write speeds (up to 1.22 GB/s for sequential reads and 620 MB/s for writes) and also efficient small file handling. We demonstrate the solution's scalability under increasing workloads. Security analysis showcases effective jail isolation techniques in TrueNAS. Cost analysis indicates potential 50% reduction in total ownership cost over five years compared to commercial alternatives. This research contributes a practical, high-performance, cost-effective alternative to proprietary solutions, paving new ways for organizations to implement secure, scalable cloud storage while maintaining data control. Future work will focus on improving automated scaling and integration with emerging technologies like containerization and serverless computing.