Reporting an Experience on Design and Implementation of e-Health Systems on Azure Cloud

Electronic Health (e-Health) technology has brought the world with significant transformation from traditional paper-based medical practice to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems for automatic management (storage, processing, and archiving) of information. Traditionally e-Health systems have been designed to operate within stovepipes on dedicated networks, physical computers, and locally managed software platforms that make it susceptible to many serious limitations including: 1) lack of on-demand scalability during critical situations; 2) high administrative overheads and costs; and 3) in-efficient resource utilization and energy consumption due to lack of automation. In this paper, we present an approach to migrate the ICT systems in the e-Health sector from traditional in-house Client/Server (C/S) architecture to the virtualised cloud computing environment. To this end, we developed two cloud-based e-Health applications (Medical Practice Management System and Telemedicine Practice System) for demonstrating how cloud services can be leveraged for developing and deploying such applications. The Windows Azure cloud computing platform is selected as an example public cloud platform for our study. We conducted several performance evaluation experiments to understand the Quality Service (QoS) tradeoffs of our applications under variable workload on Azure.Comment: Submitted to third IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC 2013

Towards intelligent distributed computing : cell-oriented computing

Distributed computing systems are of huge importance in a number of recently established and future functions in computer science. For example, they are vital to banking applications, communication of electronic systems, air traffic control, manufacturing automation, biomedical operation works, space monitoring systems and robotics information systems. As the nature of computing comes to be increasingly directed towards intelligence and autonomy, intelligent computations will be the key for all future applications. Intelligent distributed computing will become the base for the growth of an innovative generation of intelligent distributed systems. Nowadays, research centres require the development of architectures of intelligent and collaborated systems; these systems must be capable of solving problems by themselves to save processing time and reduce costs. Building an intelligent style of distributed computing that controls the whole distributed system requires communications that must be based on a completely consistent system. The model of the ideal system to be adopted in building an intelligent distributed computing structure is the human body system, specifically the body’s cells. As an artificial and virtual simulation of the high degree of intelligence that controls the body’s cells, this chapter proposes a Cell-Oriented Computing model as a solution to accomplish the desired Intelligent Distributed Computing system

Policy-based SLA storage management model for distributed data storage services

There is  high demand for storage related services supporting scientists in their research activities. Those services are expected to provide not only capacity but also features allowing for more flexible and cost efficient usage. Such features include easy multiplatform data access, long term data retention, support for performance and cost differentiating of SLA restricted data access. The paper presents a policy-based SLA storage management model for distributed data storage services. The model allows for automated management of distributed data aimed at QoS provisioning with no strict resource reservation. The problem of providing  users with the required QoS requirements is complex, and therefore the model implements heuristic approach  for solving it. The corresponding system architecture, metrics and methods for SLA focused storage management are developed and tested in a real, nationwide environment

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Resource Storage Management Model for Ensuring Quality of Service in the Cloud Archive Systems

Nowadays, service providers offer a lot of IT services in the public or private cloud. The client can buy various kinds of services like SaaS, PaaS, etc. Recently there was introduced Backup as a Service (BaaS) as a variety of SaaS. At the moment there are available several different BaaSes for archiving the data in the cloud, but they provide only a basic level of service quality. In the paper we propose a model which ensures QoS for BaaS and some  methods for management of storage resources aimed at achieving the required SLA. This model introduces a set of parameters responsible for SLA level which can be offered on the basic or higher level of quality. The storage systems (typically HSM), which are distributed between several Data Centres,  are built based on disk arrays, VTLs, and tape libraries. The RSMM model does not assume bandwidth reservation or control, but is rather focused on the management of storage resources

GMonE: a complete approach to cloud monitoring

The inherent complexity of modern cloud infrastructures has created the need for innovative monitoring approaches, as state-of-the-art solutions used for other large-scale environments do not address specific cloud features. Although cloud monitoring is nowadays an active research field, a comprehensive study covering all its aspects has not been presented yet. This paper provides a deep insight into cloud monitoring. It proposes a unified cloud monitoring taxonomy, based on which it defines a layered cloud monitoring architecture. To illustrate it, we have implemented GMonE, a general-purpose cloud monitoring tool which covers all aspects of cloud monitoring by specifically addressing the needs of modern cloud infrastructures. Furthermore, we have evaluated the performance, scalability and overhead of GMonE with Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB), by using the OpenNebula cloud middleware on the Grid’5000 experimental testbed. The results of this evaluation demonstrate the benefits of our approach, surpassing the monitoring performance and capabilities of cloud monitoring alternatives such as those present in state-of-the-art systems such as Amazon EC2 and OpenNebula

A cognitive approach for evaluating the usability of Storage as a Service in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing is a style of computing which thrives users requirements by delivering scalable, on-demand and pay-per-use IT services. It offers different service models, out of which Storage as a Service (StaaS) is the fundamental block of Infrastructure cloud that fulfills user’s excess demand of elastic computing resources.  But considering the competitive business scenario choosing the best cloud storage provider is a difficult task. Thus, usability is considered to be the key performance indicator which evaluates the better cloud storage based on user’s satisfaction. This paper aims to focus on the usability evaluation of StaaS providers namely Google drive, Drop box and One drive. This paper proposed a fuzzy based AHP model for measuring user satisfaction. Usability evaluation is carried out based on user feedback through Interview and Questionnaire method. Analysis of user feedback is done based on the fuzzy approach in order to remove vaguness. Whereas, AHP model is used for measuring satisfaction degree of the different cloud storage services and it solves the problem of selecting best cloud storage