Managed hybrid storage for home and SOHO environments

From specific-purpose storage appliances to the new generation of cloud storage services, the industry has different solutions for the data storage needs of home and small office users, whereas for backup, resource consolidation or file sharing purposes. Although dedicated appliances and cloud services offer a different balance between capacity, accessibility, and cost, the two paradigms are complementary, rather than incompatible. This paper proposes an operator-managed hybrid storage service which explores the existing complementarity between the appliance-based and the cloud-based storage service models. By making use of home gateways/routers as storage service appliances, it aims to provide an integrated solution eliminating the need for dedicated storage devices. The proposed approach fully integrates with the prevailing management frameworks already used by broadband access network operators, namely the CPE Wan Management Protocol (CWMP).