A Framework to Measure Storage Utilization in Cloud Storage Systems

Cloud storage systems aim to offer cost-effective storage services. The key is sharing resources between multiple users by virtualization technologies. Storage resources in cloud systems can not be reclaimed even when users do not access their data for a long time. Storage resources must be shared through space sharing rather than time sharing. Existing technologies improve storage utilization at various layers and data sets, making it difficult to analyze the efficiency of a cloud storage in a holistic way. To address this problem, we propose an evaluation framework to study the impacts of a wide variety of I/O techniques on an enterprise-scale cloud storage. The framework offers storage utilization evaluation from both the users and the vendors' perspective.