Towards Hybrid Multi-Cloud Storage Systems: Understanding How to Perform Data Transfer

Nowadays, storing and retrieving information over the Cloud is critical for the survival and growth of organizations and people. In this context, the possibility to store a huge amount data and files on remote third-party Cloud storage providers is becoming an even more concrete practice. Unfortunately, there is not any guarantee regarding data availability and reliability of such providers. In such a context, if the Cloud wants to use the storage as a service of another Cloud, it has only to trust it. A possible solution consists in using a Multi-Cloud Storage system. However, how organizations should compose their own Multi-Cloud storage system on geo-distribution basis is not trivial at all. In this paper, we specifically discuss how to optimize the overall system in terms of data storage and retrieval by testing and validating Multi-Cloud storage system composed of three major Cloud Storage providers that are Dropbox, Google Drive and Copy. Experiments have proved that the choice of the Cloud storage providers where to store files depends on the data transfer performance according to the chunk size. In addition, we demonstrated that not always the provider that offers the best performance in upload also offers the best performance in download.