Distributing Storage in Cloud Environments

Cloud computing has a major impact on today´s IT strategies. Outsourcing applications from IT departments to the cloud relieves users from building big infrastructures as well as from building the corresponding expertise, and allows them to focus on their main competences and businesses. One of the main hurdles of cloud computing is that not only the application, but also the data has to be moved to the cloud. Networking speed severely limits the amount of data that can travel between the cloud and the user, between different sites of the same cloud provider, or indeed between different cloud providers. It is therefore important to keep applications near the data itself. This paper investigates in which way load balancing of the computational resources as well as the data locality can be maintained at the same time. We apply recent results from balls-into-bins theory to test their applicability to cloud storage environments. We show that it is possible to both balance the load nearly perfectly and to keep the data close to its origin. The results are based on theoretical analyses and simulation of the underlying physical infrastructure of the Internet.