Cloud Storage

Final submissions due: 1 September 2015
Publication issue: May/June 2016

Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 1 August 2015.
Guest Editors: Robin Chen and Fred Douglis (ic3-2016@computer.org)

Cloud computing has established itself as a key component of the modern computing infrastructure. While the initial focus was on virtualizing computing resources, it was quickly extended to the virtualization of networking resources through software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. Virtualized and software-defined cloud storage, where storage hardware is decoupled from the storage software that manages it, is the last major piece to complete the vision of fully virtualized data centers. Cloud storage, however, brings with it a number of technical challenges. In particular, multi-tenancy — the sharing of physical resources among multiple customers of a cloud provider — results in both performance issues and questions of privacy and security. How does multi-tenant cloud storage scale to the order of petabytes or exabytes while properly isolating users and ensuring the integrity and availability of their data? How would multi-tier storage with hardware innovations reduce the overall storage cost and meet a diverse set of quality of service (QoS) requirements as the aggregate storage demands continue to escalate?

To respond to such questions, this special issue will include papers from both industry and academia that encompass various aspects of cloud storage. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following (all in the context of cloud storage):

software-defined storage;
storage QoS and performance isolation in a multi-tenant cloud;
backup, archival, and cold storage;
performance benchmarking;
evaluating storage systems;
RAID and erasure-coded storage;
multi-tier storage systems;
multi-site distributed storage systems;
storage hardware innovations;
storage networking;
Big Data storage;
video storage;
storage security and privacy;
replication and consistency; and
memory-based storage and caching.


Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words, focused on cloud storage technologies and implementations. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IC’s international readership — primarily to those practicing engineers and academics who are looking for material that introduces new technology and broadens familiarity with current topics. We do not accept white papers, and we discourage strictly theoretical or mathematical papers. To submit a manuscript, please log on to ScholarOne (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:443/ic-cs) to create or access an account, which you can use to log on to IC’s Author Center and upload your submission.