research-article

Inside dropbox: understanding personal cloud storage services

Authors:

Maurizio M. Munafo,

Aiko PrasAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference

Pages 481 - 494

https://doi.org/10.1145/2398776.2398827

Published: 14 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Personal cloud storage services are gaining popularity. With a rush of providers to enter the market and an increasing offer 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 performance 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 consecutive 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 characterize the workload users in different environments generate to the system, highlighting how this reflects on network traffic. Lastly, our results show possible performance bottlenecks 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 available in anonymized form at the SimpleWeb trace repository: http://traces.simpleweb.org/dropbox/

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Summary Review Documentation for "Inside Dropbox: Understanding Personal Cloud Storage Services", Authors: I. Drago, M. Mellia, M. Munafo, A. Sperotto, R. Sadre, A. Pras

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Inside dropbox: understanding personal cloud storage services

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cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference

November 2012

572 pages

ISBN:9781450317054

DOI:10.1145/2398776

General Chairs:
John Byers
Boston University
,
Jim Kurose
University of Massachusetts Amherst
,
Program Chairs:
Ratul Mahajan
Microsoft Research
,
Alex C. Snoeren
UC San Diego

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 14 November 2012

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IMC '12

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SIGMETRICS
SIGCOMM
USENIX Assoc

IMC '12: Internet Measurement Conference

November 14 - 16, 2012

Massachusetts, Boston, USA

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2024.3375369
Khan ALange JHagerty NPosada EHolmen JWhite JHarris AVergara VZimmer CAtchley S(2024)An Evaluation of the Effect of Network Cost Optimization for Leadership Class SupercomputersSC24: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis10.1109/SC41406.2024.00037(1-16)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2024
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