A load balancing algorithm for private cloud storage

Cloud computing enables on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as servers, storage and applications. These shared resources can be rapidly provisioned to the consumers on the basis of paying only for whatever they use. Cloud storage refers to the delivery of storage resources to the consumers over the Internet. Private cloud storage is restricted to a particular organization and data security risks are less compared to the public cloud storage. Hence, private cloud storage is built by exploiting the commodity machines within the organization and the important data is stored in it. When the utilization of such private cloud storage increases, there will be an increase in the storage demand. It leads to the expansion of the cloud storage with additional storage nodes. During such expansion, storage nodes in the cloud storage need to be balanced in terms of load. In order to maintain the load across several storage nodes, the data need to be migrated across the storage nodes. This data migration consumes more network bandwidth. The key idea behind this paper is to develop a dynamic load balancing algorithm to balance the load across the storage nodes during the expansion of private cloud storage.