Utilizing Cloud Storages for iSCSI : Is Security really expensive?

Abstract

Cloud storage promises unlimited, flexible and cheap storages, including alltime availability and accessibility with the help of various technologies. Free-of-charge o ffers for endusers allure customers the same way as professional, pay-as-you-go storages do. The delocalization of the data provokes security concerns especially regarding the con dentiality of the data. Even though encryption offers a straight-forward solution to this problem, the performance questions its applicability when it comes to the utilization of professional storage-approaches like iSCSI. In this white-paper, we propose a utilization of NoSQL-based cloudstorages like Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure for iSCSI. We evaluate the costs of a direct, bucket-based encryption and show, that in complex systems like iSCSI, the distance to the cloud represents the bottleneck instead of the encryption. Performance-boosting techniques like prefetching and caching improve the access and result in no practical overhead within such an utilization. Based on our own developed fully Java-based iSCSI target (jSCSI) and jClouds, our prototype represents, to the best of our knowledge, the rst, free available, cloud-deployable iSCSI.