Abstract: 

To provide economies of scale, storage clouds serve multiple customers from shared pools of servers and disks, commingling the data of different users and enterprises on the same devices. We identified new attacks that are possible when storage cloud vendors try to reduce costs either with client side de-duplication or though sharing of disks, key-value stores or web front ends. The talk will describe the attacks and our solutions to prevent them. 

Furthermore, one of the main obstacles hindering wider adoption of storage cloud services is vendor lock-in, a situation in which large amounts of data that is placed in one storage system cannot be migrated to another vendor, e.g., due to time and cost considerations. To prevent this situation we present an advanced on-boarding federation mechanism, enabling a cloud to add a special federation layer to efficiently import data from other storage clouds. Analyzing the payment models of existing storage clouds, we show that transferring the data via on-boarding federation with a direct link between clouds can lead to significant time and cost savings.

This talk will provide a glimpse into the storage research conducted by the IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL), which is the largest IBM research center outside the US. Some of the work was done as part of the EU-funded project VISION Cloud, which is led by IBM and consist of 13 partners. The talk is will present possible fields of common interest towards potential research collaborations between HRL and TAU.