Scalia: An Adaptive Scheme for Efficient Multi-Cloud Storage

A growing amount of data is produced daily resulting in a growing demand for storage solutions. While cloud storage providers offer a virtually infinite storage capacity, data owners seek geographical and provider diversity in data placement, in order to avoid vendor lock-in and to increase availability and durability. Moreover, depending on the customer data access pattern, a certain cloud provider may be cheaper than another. In this paper, we introduce Scalia, a cloud storage brokerage solution that continuously adapts the placement of data based on its access pattern and subject to optimization objectives, such as storage costs. Scalia efficiently considers re-positioning of only selected objects that may significantly lower the storage cost. By extensive simulation experiments, we prove the cost-effectiveness of Scalia against static placements and its proximity to the ideal data placement in various scenarios of data access patterns, of available cloud storage solutions and of failures.