Enterprise Compatible Cloud Object Storage and Synchronization Service

With the kind of growth that enterprises are witnessing, their enterprise data, especially the unstructured data, is growing like never before. This trend has led to an increase in the competition among various cloud storage services which are providing a wide range of options for storing data online. The access APIs offered by most cloud storage service providers are rarely in accordant with each other. Yet, sooner or later a company may need to find a new provider to store its data, e.g., if a new provider provides better service or at a cheaper cost. So, this lack of a common cloud API standard makes it difficult to move data from one service provider to another and is becoming a barrier to adoption by some customers. A common answer to this vendor lock-in lies in adapting common standards. The most promising direction for such is SNIA´s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), which describes the semantics of handling containers and data objects, including their metadata. In this paper we present our prototype (COSS - Cloud Object Storage and Synchronization) implementation of a CDMIcompatible enterprise Cloud Object Storage service. We also present a Synchronization service, an application that runs over the object store and explores how cloud-based clients might take advantage of it.