Towards Media Inter-cloud Standardization - Evaluating Impact of Cloud Storage Heterogeneity

Digital media has been increasing very rapidly, resulting in cloud computing's popularity gain. Cloud computing provides ease of management of large amount of data and resources. With a lot of devices communicating over the Internet and with the rapidly increasing user demands, solitary clouds have to communicate to other clouds to fulfill the demands and discover services elsewhere. This scenario is called inter-cloud computing or cloud federation. Inter-cloud computing still lacks standard architecture. Prior works discuss some of the architectural blue-prints, but none of them highlight the key issues involved and their impact, so that a valid and reliable architecture could be envisioned. In this paper, we discuss the importance of inter-cloud computing and present in detail its architectural components. Inter-cloud computing also involves some issues. We discuss key issues as well and present impact of storage heterogeneity. We have evaluated some of the most noteworthy cloud storage services, namely: Dropbox, Amazon CloudDrive, GoogleDrive, Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), Box, and SugarSync in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE), Quality of Service (QoS), and storage space efficiency. Discussion on the results shows the acceptability level of these storage services and the shortcomings in their design.