A Comparison of Redundancy Techniques for Private and Hybrid Cloud Storage

Abstract

File redundancy techniques have been very useful mechanisms for offering fault tolerance and data availability in anykind of storage. Cloud storage is not the exception. This paper presents an evaluation of classical file redundancytechniques implemented in two cloud-storage deployment models, private and hybrid. A small prototype of a privateand hybrid cloud storage was implemented for this evaluation. The performance impact when file redundancy is onlyapplied in a private cloud versus when redundancy is also distributed in a public cloud (the hybrid model) is analyzed.Additional to classical file redundancy techniques, an innovative method was evaluated for file redundancy based onan information dispersal algorithm (IDA). The usage of IDA represents a good option for managing sensitive data inhybrid cloud storage. In this technique, only parts of a file need to be sent to the public cloud, avoiding the completefile to be read from outside of the private zone. In this context, there is a trade-off between performance (forreconstructing the original file, it is first necessary to obtain all of its fragments) and the security level that coulddetermine the viability of using IDA.