@article {7096995, title = {Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison}, journal = {Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on}, volume = {PP}, year = {2015}, pages = {1-1}, abstract = {The large amount of space offered by personal cloud storage services (e.g., Dropbox and OneDrive), together with the possibility of synchronizing devices seamlessly, keep attracting customers to the cloud. Despite the high public interest, little information about system design and actual implications on performance is available when selecting a cloud storage service. Systematic benchmarks to assist in comparing services and understanding the effects of design choices are still lacking. This paper proposes a methodology to understand and benchmark personal cloud storage services. Our methodology unveils their architecture and capabilities. Moreover, by means of repeatable and customizable tests, it allows the measurement of performance metrics under different workloads. The effectiveness of the methodology is shown in a case study in which 11 services are compared under the same conditions. Our case study reveals interesting differences in design choices. Their implications are assessed in a series of benchmarks. Results show no clear winner, with all services having potential for improving performance. In some scenarios, the synchronization of the same files can take 20 times longer. In other cases, we observe a wastage of twice as much network capacity, questioning the design of some services. Our methodology and results are thus useful both as benchmarks and as guidelines for system design.}, keywords = {Benchmark testing, Cloud computing, Cloud storage, Computers, Google, Measurements, Performance, Servers, Synchronization}, issn = {2168-7161}, doi = {10.1109/TCC.2015.2427191}, author = {Enrico Bocchi and Idilio Drago and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Boc2015, title = {Personal Cloud Storage: Usage, Performance and Impact of Terminals }, booktitle = {4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet 2015)}, year = {2015}, month = {10/2015}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Niagara Falls, Canada}, abstract = {

Personal cloud storage services such as Dropbox and OneDrive are popular among Internet users. They help in sharing content and backing up data by relying on the cloud to store files. The rise of mobile terminals and the presence of new providers question whether the usage of cloud storage is evolving. This knowledge is essential to understand the workload these services need to handle, their performance, and implications. In this paper we present a comprehensive characterization of personal cloud storage services. Relying on traces collected for one month in an operational network, we show that users of each service present distinct behaviors. Dropbox is now threatened by competitors, with OneDrive and Google Drive reaching large market shares. However, the popularity of the latter services seems to be driven by their integration into Windows and Android. Indeed, around 50\% of their users do not produce any workload. Considering performance, providers show distinct trade-offs, with bottlenecks that hardly allow users to fully exploit their access line bandwidth. Finally, usage of cloud services is now ordinary among mobile users, thanks to the automatic backup of pictures and media files.

}, keywords = {Cloud storage, Monitoring}, url = {http://www.ieee-cloudnet.org/program.html}, author = {Enrico Bocchi and Idilio Drago and Marco Mellia} } @inproceedings {Dra2013, title = {Benchmarking Personal Cloud Storage}, booktitle = {Internet Measurement Conference - IMC}, year = {2013}, month = {10/2013}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Barcelona (ES)}, abstract = {

Personal cloud storage services are data-intensive applica- tions already producing a significant share of Internet traffic. Several solutions offered by different companies attract more and more people. However, little is known about each service capabilities, architecture and {\textendash} most of all {\textendash} performance implications of design choices. This paper presents a methodology to study cloud storage services. We apply our methodology to compare 5 popular offers, revealing different system architectures and capabilities. The implications on performance of different designs are assessed executing a series of benchmarks. Our results show no clear winner, with all services suffering from some limitations or having potential for improvement. In some scenarios, the upload of the same file set can take seven times more, wasting twice as much capacity. Our methodology and results are useful thus as both benchmark and guideline for system design.

}, keywords = {Active Measurements, Personal Cloud Storage}, doi = {10.1145/2504730.2504762}, url = {http://www.simpleweb.org/wiki/Cloud_benchmarks}, author = {Idilio Drago and Enrico Bocchi and Marco Mellia and Herman Slatman and Aiko Pras} } @inproceedings {Dra2012, title = {Inside Dropbox: Understanding Personal Cloud Storage Services}, booktitle = {Internet Measurement Conference - IMC}, year = {2012}, month = {11/2012}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Boston, MA}, abstract = {

Personal cloud storage services are gaining popularity. With a rush of providers to enter the market and an increasing of- fer of cheap storage space, it is to be expected that cloud storage will soon generate a high amount of Internet traffic. Very little is known about the architecture and the perfor- mance of such systems, and the workload they have to face. This understanding is essential for designing efficient cloud storage systems and predicting their impact on the network.

This paper presents a characterization of Dropbox, the leading solution in personal cloud storage in our datasets. By means of passive measurements, we analyze data from four vantage points in Europe, collected during 42 consecu- tive days. Our contributions are threefold: Firstly, we are the first to study Dropbox, which we show to be the most widely-used cloud storage system, already accounting for a volume equivalent to around one third of the YouTube traffic at campus networks on some days. Secondly, we character- ize the workload users in different environments generate to the system, highlighting how this reflects on network traf- fic. Lastly, our results show possible performance bottle- necks caused by both the current system architecture and the storage protocol. This is exacerbated for users connected far from storage data-centers.

All measurements used in our analyses are publicly avail- able in anonymized form at the SimpleWeb trace repository: http://traces.simpleweb.org/dropbox/

}, keywords = {Dropbox, passive measurement}, issn = {978-1-4503-1705-4}, doi = {10.1145/2398776.2398827}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2398776.2398827\&coll=DL\&dl=GUIDE\&CFID=225051145\&CFTOKEN=42401286}, author = {Idilio Drago and Marco Mellia and Maurizio M Munafo{\textquoteright} and Anna Sperotto and Ramin Sadre and Aiko Pras} }