FAB Storage for the Hybrid Cloud

Storage is the Achilles heel of hybrid cloud deployments of workloads. Accessing persistent state over a WAN link, even a dedicated one, delivers an over-whelming performance blow to application performance. We propose FAB, a new storage architecture for the hybrid cloud. FAB addresses two major challenges for hybrid cloud storage, performance efficiency and backup efficiency. It does so by creating a new FAB layer in the storage stack that enables fault-tolerance, performance acceleration, and backup for FAB storage volumes. A preliminary evaluation of FAB's performance acceleration mechanism when deployed over Ceph's distributed block storage system offers encouragement to pursue this new hybrid cloud storage architecture.