Security-Aware Allocation of Replicated Data in Distributed Storage Systems

Distributed storage systems offer scalable and cost-effective solutions for managing large data collections. A critical factor for the adoption of these systems is the allocation of data (possibly including replicas) to the storage nodes satisfying operational and security requirements, while ensuring economic effectiveness. Appropriate data and replica management provides significant benefits, ranging from enhanced fault tolerance and improved data availability, to reduced latency and optimized workload distribution. A suboptimal placement of data and replicas can instead lead to excessive costs, security risks, and performance bottlenecks. This paper proposes a novel model for permitting data owners to specify in a friendly manner complex data and replica allocation constraints, and an approach for computing optimal (satisfying operational and security requirements and minimizing costs) data allocations in distributed storage environments. Our work aims to improve the reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness of distributed storage systems.