SEARS: Space Efficient And Reliable Storage System in the Cloud

Today's cloud storage services must offer storage reliability and fast data retrieval for large amount of data without sacrificing storage cost. We present SEARS, a cloud-based storage system which integrates erasure coding and data deduplication to support efficient and reliable data storage with fast user response time. With proper association of data to storage server clusters, SEARS provides flexible mixing of different configurations, suitable for real-time and archival applications. Our prototype implementation of SEARS over Amazon EC2 shows that it outperforms existing storage systems in storage efficiency and file retrieval time. For 3 MB files, SEARS delivers retrieval time of $2.5$ s compared to $7$ s with existing systems.Comment: 4 pages, IEEE LCN 201

Coding for Fast Content Download

We study the fundamental trade-off between storage and content download time. We show that the download time can be significantly reduced by dividing the content into chunks, encoding it to add redundancy and then distributing it across multiple disks. We determine the download time for two content access models - the fountain and fork-join models that involve simultaneous content access, and individual access from enqueued user requests respectively. For the fountain model we explicitly characterize the download time, while in the fork-join model we derive the upper and lower bounds. Our results show that coding reduces download time, through the diversity of distributing the data across more disks, even for the total storage used.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conferenc