Analysis of cloud storage providers for enterprise readiness based on usage patterns and local resources

摘要

Internet based storage providers “Cloud Storage” are growing in popularity at an incredible rate. Online file sharing and backup has become so ubiquitous in the consumer marketplace that many systems administrators are beginning to consider it a viable option for corporate and enterprise level file sharing and archival needs. Many file sharing companies claim they can meet the needs requested by modern business however, after an in depth review of available literature we have found that the only third party analysis of performance of these technologies comes in the form of synthetic benchmarks, statistical analysis, or theoretical performance based on a given systems architecture. We propose that a better understanding of performance can be realized via real world metrics obtained by simulating workloads a system may encounter when placed into production. Here we provide the results obtained from actual workloads placed on the services from a variety of settings ranging from high bandwidth - high availability enterprise grade connections from server systems rivaling the power of the storage architecture, to more pedestrian scenarios involving residential grade access and hardware. Based upon analysis of the results we determine the enterprise readiness of each cloud storage solution, and provide unbiased recommendation as to which systems are viable storage solutions for businesses based on their likely usage scenarios and their available resources.