Brokering Algorithms for Optimizing the Availability and Cost of Cloud Storage Services

In recent years, cloud storage providers have gained popularity for personal and organizational data, and provided highly reliable, scalable and flexible resources to cloud users. Although cloud providers bring advantages to their users, most cloud providers suffer outages from time-to-time. Therefore, relying on a single cloud storage services threatens service availability of cloud users. We believe that using multi-cloud broker is a plausible solution to remove single point of failure and to achieve very high availability. Since highly reliable cloud storage services impose enormous cost to the user, and also as the size of data objects in the cloud storage reaches magnitude of exabyte, optimal selection among a set of cloud storage providers is a crucial decision for users. To solve this problem, we propose an algorithm that determines the minimum replication cost of objects such that the expected availability for users is guaranteed. We also propose an algorithm to optimally select data centers for striped objects such that the expected availability under a given budget is maximized. Simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate our algorithms, using failure probability and storage cost taken from real cloud storage providers.