RACS: Redundant Array of Cloud Storage
Introduction
RACS is a cloud storage proxy that transparently stripes data across multiple cloud storage providers. Striping data across multiple providers allows clients to tolerate outages and economic failures; where a change in the marketplace renders it prohibitively expensive for a cloud storage client to continue to use a particular service. The added redundancy in RACS to escape potential vendor lock-in. RACS reduces the one-time cost of switching storage providers in exchange for additional operational overhead. Finally, RACS assumes a minimal storage interface (put, get, delete, list) and exposes an S3-like interface to its clients.
A single RACS proxy | Multiple RACS proxies coordinate via Zookeeper | RACS smooths price hikes |
Publications
- RACS: A Case for Cloud Storage Diversity. Hussam Abu-Libdeh, Lonnie Princehouse, Hakim Weatherspoon. ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC). June 2010, Indianapolis, IN. Paper: pdf (282 KB), ps (2.8 MB), ps.gz (1.3 MB)