Improving Performance and Capacity Utilization in Cloud Storage for Content Delivery and Sharing Services

Content delivery and sharing (CDS) is a popular and cost effective cloud-based service for organizations to deliver/share contents to/with end-users, partners and insider users. This type of service improves the data availability and I/O performance by producing and distributing replicas of shared contents. However, such a technique increases overhead on the storage/network resources. This article introduces a threefold methodology to improve the trade-off between I/O performance and capacity utilization of cloud storage for CDS services. This methodology includes: i) Definition of a classification model for identifying types of users and contents by analyzing their consumption/ demand and sharing patterns, ii) Usage of the classification model for defining content availability and load balancing schemes, and iii) Integration of a dynamic availability scheme into a cloud-based CDS system. Our method was implemented on both a simulator and a real-world CDS service, supporting information sharing operations performed in a cloud storage. An experimental evaluation, conducted in a private cloud through simulation and emulation of workloads, showed the feasibility of this methodology in terms of storage capacity utilization, whereas the real-world implementation revealed the efficiency of applying a classification model to information sharing patterns in terms of I/O performance.