Transfer as a Service: Towards a Cost-Effective Model for Multi-site Cloud Data Management

The global deployment of cloud datacenters is enabling large web services to deliver fast response to users worldwide. This unprecedented geographical distribution of the computation also brings new challenges related to the efficient data management across sites. High throughput, low latencies, cost-or energy-related trade-offs are just a few concerns for both cloud providers and users when it comes to handling data across datacenters. Existing cloud data management solutions are limited to cloud-provided storage, which offers low performance based on rigid cost schemas. In this paper, we are proposing a dedicated cloud data transfer service that supports large-scale data dissemination across geographically distributed sites, advocating for a Transfer as a Service (TaaS) paradigm. The system aggregates the available bandwidth by enabling multiroute transfers across cloud sites. For users of multi-site or federated clouds, our proposal is able to decrease the variability of transfers and increase the throughput up to three times compared to baseline user options, while benefiting from the well-known high availability of cloud-provided services. For cloud providers, such a service can decrease the energy consumption within a datacenter down to half compared to user-based transfers.