Cloud Storage in a private cloud deployment: Lessons for Data Intensive research (Best student paper)
Victor I. C. Chang, Robert John Walters, Gary Brian Wills · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2012
This paper demonstrates portability for a private cloud deployment, which has a detailed case study about Cloud Storage service developed as part of the Cloud Computing Business Framework (CCBF).Our Cloud Storage design and deployment is based on Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, details of which include functionalities, technical implementation, architecture and user support.Experiments for data services (backup automation, data recovery and data migration) are performed and results confirm backup automation is completed swiftly and is reliable for data-intensive research.Data recovery result confirms that execution time is in proportion to quantity of recovered data, but the failure rate increases in an exponential manner.Data migration result confirms execution time is in proportion to disk volume of migrated data, but the failure rate increases in an exponential manner.Issues in data recovery and data migration must be resolved prior dealing with petabytes of data.Our Cloud Storage offers cost reduction, time-saving and user friendliness supported by users and is highly relevant to similar portability of private cloud. Cloud StorageCloud Storage is a crucial project funded and supported by NHS UK, where Guy's and St Thomas NHS Trust (GSTT) and King's College London (KCL) have worked together to deliver a service, with the initial plan for proof of concepts and to see whether Cloud Storage can be useful.Cloud Storage development began in September 2008 and completed in May 2010 to serve cancer researchers.CCBF is instrumental and influential in the way Cloud Storage has been developed with the following reasons: Cloud Storage is a PaaS, and needs careful planning and a thorough implementation.This requires using an integrated adoption of multiple vendors' solutions. Cloud Storage is an area to experience rapid growth in user requirements and disk space consumption.Therefore, it must be easy to use, and able to cope with an increasing demand. Cloud Storage is a new concept and implementation for Health domain, as in the past, private and in-house storage is used.Maintenance of data protection and security is a challenge.Recommendation, strategy and support from CCBF can offer useful guidelines and good services.The Healthcare Cloud Storage is used in the Breast Cancer project.Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and has a worldwide annual incidence of over 1 million cases.There are thousands of data about patients (medical records) and tumours (detailed descriptions and images, and its relations to the patients).Data growth is rapid and needs to be carefully used and protected.The work involves integrating software and cloud technologies from commercial vendors including Oracle, VMWare, EMC, Iomega and HP.This is to ensure a solid infrastructure and platform is available and robust.There are also uses of third party applications to allow researchers to be able to access, view and edit any tumour images from trusted places.Security has been enforced in terms of data encryption, SSL and firewall.This project is considered as a group of Private Clouds, and is not yet to join all different Private Clouds (distributed in different areas) together.Cloud Storage adopts Experiments as the main method to design and implement a robust Storage Area Network (SAN).This is based on integrations of different technologies where experiments are required.In relation to Cloud portability, better performance in Cloud Storage than outdated storage service is regarded as a benchmark and measurement for success by executives.A hybrid case study is used, as it requires both quantitative and qualitative information not covered by experiments.Occasionally checking with users and executives about their requirements and services they prefer, take place in the form of interviews, and thus a certain extent of qualitative method is needed.Users are very supportive in this project and some of them use it daily. Benefits and impacts of adopting CCBFThe benefits of adopting CCBF allows their IT lead to understand requirements, technical knowledge, use cases and issues to be aware of, before and during the project development.The Private Cloud Storage project is divided into four stages summed up as follows. Stage 1: Explore available technologies, understanding strength and weaknesses for each key technology.Capture user requirements to get into technical plans. Stage 2: Propose a framework based on the outcomes in Stage 1 and CCBF, and carry out plans for building and validating the framework. Stage 3: Propose and implementing service oriented architecture for Cloud Storage based on CCBF.Offer services for users and research groups.