Cumulus and BlueSky: Migrating Enterprise Storage to the Cloud

April 14, 2011
Michael Vrable | UC San Diego

Building on top of cloud computing infrastructure, instead of deploying and maintaining hardware directly, offers the promise of lower cost, simplified management, and greater scalability. This model has been used successfully for building scalable web applications and bulk data processing pipelines, but has not yet replaced much internal computing infrastructure within organizations. I will present two pieces of work aimed at migrating one class of application, internal data storage applications, to infrastructure-as-a-service cloud providers. The first, Cumulus, provides file system backup with data stored in the cloud. The second, BlueSky, is a network file server which stores the file system data in the cloud (though some data is cached locally). I describe the design and evaluate the performance of both systems, showing how we consider the issues of cost, performance, and data security.

Speaker Details

Michael Vrable is a Ph.D. candidate in the Systems and Networking group of the Computer Science and Engineering department at UC San Diego. He has worked in a number of research areas including computer virtualization, security, and cloud computing/cloud storage. He is advised by professors Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage. Prior to attending UCSD, he graduated with a B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Harvey Mudd College.