Data-Intensive Cloud Computing: Requirements, Expectations, Challenges, and Solutions

Data-intensive systems encompass terabytes to petabytes of data. Such systems require massive storage and intensive computational power in order to execute complex queries and generate timely results. Further, the rate at which this data is being generated induces extensive challenges of data storage, linking, and processing. A data-intensive cloud provides an abstraction of high availability, usability, and efficiency to users. However, underlying this abstraction, there are stringent requirements and challenges to facilitate scalable and resourceful services through effective physical infrastructure, smart networking solutions, intelligent software tools, and useful software approaches. This paper analyzes the extensive requirements which exist in data-intensive clouds, describes various challenges related to the paradigm, and assess numerous solutions in meeting these requirements and challenges. It provides a detailed study of the solutions and analyzes their capabilities in meeting emerging needs of widespread applications.