The Evolution of Cloud Computing and Its Impact on Data Storage and Management

ABSTRACT
Enterprises are driving towards less cost, more availability, agility, managed risk - all of
which is accelerated towards Cloud Computing. Cloud is not a particular product, but a way
of delivering IT services that are consumable on demand, elastic to scale up and down as
needed, and follow a pay-for-usage model. Out of the three common types of cloud
computing service models, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model that provides
servers, computing power, network bandwidth and Storage capacity, as a service to their
subscribers. Cloud can relate to many things but without the fundamental storage pieces,
which is provided as a service namely Cloud Storage, none of the other applications is
possible. This paper introduces Cloud Storage, which covers the key technologies in cloud
computing and Cloud Storage, management insights about cloud computing, different types
of cloud services, driving forces of cloud computing and cloud storage, advantages and
challenges of cloud storage and concludes by pinpointing few challenges to be addressed by
the cloud storage providers.

INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing transforms the way in which current enterprises IT infrastructure is
constituted and managed through consumable services such as infrastructure, platform, and
applications. It will convert the IT infrastructure from a “factory” into a “supply chain”
model. It is a type of computing that provides simple, on- demand access to pools of highly
elastic computing resources. These resources are provided as a service over a network, often
the Internet. Cloud enables the consumers of the technology to think of computing as
effectively limitless, of minimal cost, and reliable, as well as not to be concerned about how
it is constructed, how it works, who operates it, or where it is located. The cloud computing
model is enabled by the ongoing standardization of underlying technologies like
virtualization, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Web 2.0.
Cloud computing is a style of computing where computing resources are easy to obtain and
access, simple to use, cheap, and just work. Cloud is not a point product or a singular
technology, but a way to deliver IT resources in a manner that provides self-service, on-

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demand and pay-per-use consumption. Utilizing cloud delivers time and cost savings. Cloud
involves the subscriber and the provider. The service provider can be a company‟s internal
IT group, a trusted third party or a combination of both. The subscriber is anyone who uses
the services. By making data available in the cloud, it can be more easily and ubiquitously
accessed, often at much lower cost, increasing its value by enabling opportunities for
enhanced collaboration, integration, and analysis on a shared common platform.

KEY TECHNOLOGIES
Types of Cloud
In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer
have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of
computers that make up the cloud handles them instead which leads in reduction of hardware
and software demands on the user's side. A typical cloud computing architecture is given in
Fig.1. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing
systems interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's
network takes care of the rest.
There are three common types of clouds available namely, Private, Public and Hybrid cloud
which is represented in Fig. 2. A private cloud is based upon a pool of shared resources,
whose access is limited within organizational boundaries. The resources are accessed over a
private and secured intranet, and are all owned and controlled by the company‟s IT
organization. In essence, the cloud computing business model is brought and managed in-
house to enable shared IT services. A public cloud is a domain where the public Internet is
used to obtain cloud services. The resources that make up those services are owned by the
respective cloud service providers. Some examples include Salesforce.com, Google App
Engine and Google search, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web services such as EC2

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Fig. 1 A typical Cloud computing system

A Hybrid cloud is a combination of private and public clouds, where services from each
domain are consumed in an integrated fashion and include an extended relationship with the
selected external service providers.

Fig. 2 Three types of Cloud computing model

Cloud Computing Service Models

Private and Public clouds serve as the backbone for a variety of different cloud computing
service models given in Fig.3. Currently the industry has been successfully adopting three
common types of cloud computing service models.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), is a service model around servers (compute power), storage
capacity, and network bandwidth. Examples include Amazon EC2 and S3, Rackspace,
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AT&T, and Verizon.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides an externally managed platform for building and
deploying applications and services. This model typically provides development tools such as
databases and development studios for working with the supplied frameworks, as well as the
infrastructure to host the built application. Examples include Force.com, Microsoft Azure,
and Google App Engine.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is simply having a software system running on a computer that
doesn't belong to the customer and isn't on the customer‟s premises. It is based on the
concept of renting an application from a service provider rather than buying, installing and
running software yourself.

Fig. 3 Three types of Cloud service models

Key benefits of Cloud Computing

Management Insight, NH, USA, which is a dedicated market research consulting firm,
conducted a study (6) on the impact of Cloud services in the market. This study was
sponsored by CA Technologies, New York, USA. The statistical data (given in Fig.4 & 5)
has revealed the following facts.

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Fig. 4 IT personnel attitude towards the Cloud

Fig. 5 Usage of Cloud services in the market Cloud computing offers the following
advantages to the enterprises:
Lower costs: All resources, including expensive networking equipment, servers, IT
personnel, etc. are shared, resulting in reduced costs, especially for small to mid-sized
applications.
Shifting Capital Expenses to Operational Expenses: Cloud computing enables companies to
shift money from capital expenses to operating expenses, which ultimately allows the
enterprise to focus their money and resources on innovation.
Agility: Provisioning on-demand enables faster setup on an as-needed basis. When a project
is funded, customer can initiate service, and then if the project is over, they can simply
terminate the cloud contract.
Scalability: Many cloud services can smoothly and efficiently scale to handle the growing
nature of the business with a more cost effective pay-as-you-go model. This is also known as
elasticity.

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Simplified maintenance: Patches and upgrades are rapidly deployed across the shared
infrastructure, as well as the backups.
Diverse platform support: Many cloud computing services offer built-in support for a rich
collection of client platforms including browsers, mobile, and more. This diverse platform
support enables applications to reach a broader category of users.
Faster development: Cloud computing platforms provide many of the core services that,
under traditional development models, would normally be built in house. These services, plus
templates and other tools can significantly accelerate the development cycle.
Large scale prototyping / Testing: Cloud computing makes large scale prototyping and
load testing much easier. A client can easily spawn 1,000 servers in the cloud to load test
your application and then release them as soon as they are done, and then try doing that with
owned or corporate servers.

CLOUD STORAGE
Rapid data growth and the need to keep it safer and longer will require organizations to
integrate how they manage and use their data, from creation to end of life. Now there is an
opportunity to store all our data in the internet. Those off-site storages are provided and
maintained by the third parties through the Internet which is represented in Fig. 6. Cloud
storage offers a large pool of storage was available for use, with three significant attributes:
access via Web services APIs on a non persistent network connection, immediate availability
of very large quantities of storage, and pay for what you use. It supports rapid scalability.
Evolution of Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is an offering of cloud computing. Fig. 7 shows the evolution of Cloud Storage
based on traditional network storage and hosted storage. Benefit of cloud storage is the
access of your data from anywhere. Cloud storage providers provide storage varying from
small amount of data to even the entire warehouse of an organization. Subscriber can pay to
the cloud storage provider for what they are using and how much they are transferring to the
cloud storage.

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Fig. 6 Simple cloud storage model

Basically the cloud storage subscriber copies the data into any one of the data server of the
cloud storage provider. That copy of data will be made available to all the other data servers
of the cloud storage provider featuring redundancy in the availability which ensures that the
data of the subscriber is safe even anything goes wrong. Most systems store the same data on
servers that use different power supplies.

Benefits of Cloud storage:

 No need to invest any capital on storage devices.
 No need for technical expert to maintain the storage, backup, replication and importantly
disaster management.
 Allowing others to access your data will result with collaborative working style instead
of individual work.

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 Fig. 7 Evolution of Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage Reference Model

The appeal of cloud storage is due to some of the same attributes that define other cloud
services: pay as you go, the illusion of infinite capacity (elasticity), and the simplicity of
use/management. It is therefore important that any interface for cloud storage support these
attributes, while allowing for a multitude of business cases and offerings, long into the future.
The model created and published by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)
shows multiple types of cloud data storage interfaces are able to support both legacy and new
applications. All of the interfaces allow storage to be provided on demand, drawn from a
pool of resources. The capacity is drawn from a pool of storage capacity provided by storage
services. The data services are applied to individual data elements as determined by the data
system metadata. Metadata specifies the data requirements on the basis of individual data
elements or on groups of data elements (containers).
As shown in Fig. 8, Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) is the functional interface
that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the cloud.
As part of this interface the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage
offering and use this interface to manage containers and the data that is placed in them. In
addition, metadata can be set on containers and their contained data elements through this
interface. It is expected that the interface will be able to be implemented by the majority of
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 existing cloud storage offerings today. This can be done with an adapter to their existing
proprietary interface, or by implementing the interface directly. In addition, existing client
libraries such as eXtensible Access Method (XAM) can be adapted to this interface as show
in Fig. 8.

Fig. 8 Cloud Storage Reference model

This interface is also used by administrative and management applications to manage

containers, accounts, security access, monitoring/billing information and even for storage
that is accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying storage and data
services are exposed so that clients can understand the offering. Conformant cloud offerings
may offer a subset of either interface as long as they expose the limitations in the capabilities
part of the interface.
Cloud Storage API
A Cloud Storage Application Programming Interface (API) is a method for access to and
utilization of a cloud storage system [3,11]. The most common of these kinds are REST
(REpresentational State Transfer) although there are others, which are based on SOAP
(Simple Object Access Protocol). All these APIs are associated with establishing requests for
service via the Internet. REST is a concept widely recognized as an approach to "quality"
scalable API design.
One of the most important features of REST is that it is a "stateless" architecture [10, 11].
This means that everything needed to complete the request to the storage cloud is contained
in the request, so that a session between the requestor and the storage cloud is not required. It
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 is very important because the Internet is highly latent (it has an unpredictable response time
and it is generally not fast when compared to a local area network). REST is an approach that
has very high affinity to the way the Internet works. Traditional file storage access methods
that use NFS (network files system) or CIFS (Common Internet File System) do not work
over the Internet, because of latency.
Cloud Storage is for files, which, some refer to as objects, and others call unstructured data.
Think about the files stored on your PC, like pictures, spreadsheets and documents. These
have an extraordinary variability, thus unstructured. The other kind of data is block or
structured data. Think data base data, data that feeds transactional system that require a
certain guaranteed or low-latency performance. Cloud Storage is not for this use case.
Industrial Design Centre (IDC) estimates that approximately 70% of the machine stored data
in the world is unstructured, and this is also the fastest growing data type. So, Cloud Storage
is storage for files that is easily accessed via the Internet. This does not mean you cannot
access Cloud Storage on a private network or LAN, which may also provide access to a
storage cloud by other approaches, like NFS or CIFS. It does mean that the primary and
preferred access is by a REST API.
REST APIs are language neutral and therefore can be leveraged very easily by developers
using any development language they choose. Resources within the system may be acted on
through a URL. So, an API is not a "programming language", but it is the way a
programming language is used to access a storage cloud. REST APIs are also about changing
the state of resource through representations of those resources. They are not about calling
web service methods in a functional sense. The key differences between different Cloud
Storage APIs are the URLs defining the resources and the format of the representations.
Amazon S3 APIs, Eucalyptus APIs, Rackspace Cloud Files APIs, Mezeo APIs, Nivanix
APIs, Simple Cloud API, along with the standards proposed by the Storage Networking
Industry Association (SNIA) Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, and more.

ISSUES IN CLOUD STORAGE

Cloud storage gets the attention of IT managers with its comparatively low cost and ability to
easily adjust capacity. Although cloud storage offers reduction in the capital investment cost,
customers has to face some of the technical, integration, security and organizational issues at
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 various levels. Also Fig. 9 shows how IT people are hesitating to take up the cloud services.
Control over the Data: Since the data is residing outside the enterprise‟s infrastructure, it is
perceived that the enterprise may loss the control over data. Although the concerns are
largely hypothetical and psychological rather than actual, due to the immaturity of cloud
services, standards on the delivery of services and their evolving business model, users may
have genuine concerns about the service provider‟s viability and operational processes.
Interoperability & Control: The complexity of using cloud storage is something many
customers underestimate “It‟s not plug-and-play.” Each vendor has different access methods,
nonstandard APIs that make integrating applications, such as archiving or file shares with
cloud storage, difficult and costly. Some vendors provide software clients that implement
common network file sharing protocols such as Network File System (NFS) or Common
Internet File System (CIFS) [11], but these are proprietary and cannot bridge between
different cloud services. The lack of standard protocols for accessing cloud storage means
there is no interoperability between cloud storage providers, greatly complicating the data
migration.
Performance & Security: Access to cloud data is obviously limited by network throughput
and latency, and despite of drastic improvements in Internet performance, it is still poor in
comparison to local network storage. Although some vendors attempt to enhance throughput
with various local caching and compression techniques, these don‟t improve Internet latency.
Data security is the biggest issue with cloud storage. If any possibility leakage, both in
transfer and within a shared infrastructure, experts agree that using encryption on all data
stored in a cloud is essential although depending on the application, this is easier said than
done.
Suitability of applications: A kind of more static data, inactive data, such as applications that
include online backup and archiving is the best fit for cloud storage. The archiving kind of
data works well in the cloud because the data changes less frequently. These data don‟t
require high speed transactional access. Bulk data can be easily compressed using data
reduction technologies as well as it can be easily encrypted. Applications like content
delivery of rich media such as video, audio, or image files, Web 2.0 applications, user files
and email repositories are some examples for best fit into the cloud storage. The applications
with low I/O performance and tolerance for low downtime are suitable residents in cloud
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 storage.

Fig. 9 Reasons why IT personnel hesitate to take up cloud services

Conclusion
Cloud computing represents the next evolutionary step toward elastic IT. Cloud emergence
transforms the way in which IT infrastructure is constituted and managed through
consumable services for infrastructure, platform, and applications. This idea converts IT
infrastructure from a “factory” into a “supply chain”. There may be a stage to come when
Internet is going to be the communication channel for mass media, then we cannot imagine a
world without cloud storage because keeping ownership and maintaining huge volume of
data on our own infrastructure is unimaginable. So automatically cloud storage will capture
the entire market as we see rental houses leased to the tenants which is an unavoidable and a
must situation in a growing populated city.
Cloud storage strategies and service models are still in its early stages. Standardization of
service provider‟s service levels, pricing plans, data access methods, operational and security
processes, emergency plans for data migration if the enterprise sooner or later wish to change
vendors, improving the performance by opting better load balancing methodology are some
of the thrust areas where future works on cloud storage can be focused.

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 References
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