PROXY: A high cost-performance cloud storage gateway

Now, the cloud storage gateway system is widely used in enterprise systems, which is viewed as a link between the local storage systems and cloud storage providers. Since the gateway system can simplify the interaction with cloud storage services, while boosting performance and reducing cost, more and more enterprises prefer it as their first choice to use cloud storage services. In this article, we present a distributed cloud storage gateway system with no central node, as called PROXY. Our goal is to build a lightweight system with high cost-performance, which is easy to deploy and scale. We design the architecture of PROXY with efficient message and transfer modules. Also we propose a distributed caching structure in storage nodes and a policy-driven model to make the whole system more cost-effective. A prototype of PROXY is implemented to evaluate the frontend performance and the cost of the system. The evaluation results have shown the excellent cost-performance: Compared to the cloud storage platforms, PROXY achieves an average of 83.21% improvements in cost savings, and shortens the response time by a factor 4 to 40.