Combining Query Performance with Data Integrity in the Cloud: A Hybrid Cloud Storage Framework to Enhance Data Access on the Windows Azure Platform

Non-relational Cloud Storage Services, such as Windows Azure´s Table Storage, promise high scalability and nearby constant response times, even with an increasing number of concurrent transactions. Measurement data that is examined throughout this paper, however, reveals a fairly high number of query performance anomalies as well as a drop in response time with an increasing entity size. To address these issues, we propose an intermediate storage service, namely the Hybrid Cloud Storage Framework (HCSF), which combines the performance advantage of the Azure Distributed Cache with the data integrity of Table Storage. The paper concludes with a performance benchmark of the HCSF with Azure´s Table Storage.