NAND flash memories are popular due to their density and lower cost. However, due to serial access, NAND flash memories have low read and write speeds. As the flash sizes increase to 64GB and beyond, searches through flash memories become painfully slow. In this work we present a hardware design enhancement technique to speed-up search through flash memories. The basic idea is to generate a small signature for every memory block and store them in a signature block(s). When a search is initiated, signature block is searched which produces reference of possible blocks where data might be contained, reducing the total number of read operations. The additional hardware has no impact on read access times or sequential write times but increases the random write times by an average of 8-9%. Simulation experiments were performed for flash memory of size up to 16Gb. Simulation results show that the performance of searches improve by 2000X by using the proposed technique. The signature-based technique is used to find exact matching data. A discrete cosine transform based technique is used when partial matching of data is required. The same setup is also used to increase storage efficiency of data by performing data deduplication on the flash memory. The hardware implementation of the search technique results in 0.02% increase in area, 3.53% increase in power and can operate at a maximum frequency of 0.47GHz.

Past few years have witnessed a dramatic shift for IT infrastructures from a self-sustained model to a centralized and multi-tenant elastic computing paradigm -- Cloud Computing, which significantly reshapes the landscape of existing data utilization services. In truth, public cloud service providers (CSPs), e.g. Google, Amazon, offer us unprecedented benefits, such as ubiquitous and flexible access, considerable capital expenditure savings and on-demand resource allocation. Cloud has become the virtual ``brain" as well to support and propel many important applications and system designs, for example, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and so forth; on the flip side, security and privacy are among the primary concerns with the adoption of cloud-based data services in that the user loses control of her/his outsourced data. Encrypting the sensitive user information certainly ensures the confidentiality. However, encryption places an extra layer of ambiguity and its direct use may be at odds with the practical requirements and defeat the purpose of cloud computing technology. We believe that security in nature should not be in contravention of the cloud outsourcing model. Rather, it is expected to complement the current achievements to further fuel the wide adoption of the public cloud service. This, in turn, requires us not to decouple them from the very beginning of the system design. Drawing the successes and failures from both academia and industry, we attempt to answer the challenges of realizing efficient and useful secure data services in the public cloud. In particular, we pay attention to security and privacy in two essential functions of the cloud ``brain", i.e. data storage and processing. Our first work centers on the secure chunk-based deduplication of encrypted data for cloud backup and achieves the performance comparable to the plaintext cloud storage deduplication while effectively mitigating the information leakage from the low-entropy chunks. On the other hand, we comprehensively study the promising yet challenging issue of search over encrypted data in the cloud environment, which allows a user to delegate her/his search task to a CSP server that hosts a collection of encrypted files while still guaranteeing some measure of query privacy. In order to accomplish this grand vision, we explore both software-based secure computation research that often relies on cryptography and concentrates on algorithmic design and theoretical proof, and trusted execution solutions that depend on hardware-based isolation and trusted computing. Hopefully, through the lens of our efforts, insights could be furnished into future research in the related areas. / Ph. D.

Detta examensarbete handlar om undersökning av tre olika användningsfall inom datalagring; Cold Storage, High Performance Storage och Virtual Machine Storage. Rapporten har som syfte att ge en översikt över kommersiella distribuerade filsystem samt en djupare undersökning av distribuerade filsystem som bygger på öppen källkod och därmed hitta en optimal lösning för dessa användnings-fall. I undersökningen ingick att analysera och jämföra tidigare arbeten där jämförelser mellan pre-standamätningar, dataskydd och kostnader utfördes samt lyfta upp diverse funktionaliteter (snapshotting, multi-tenancy, datadeduplicering, datareplikering) som moderna distribuerade filsy-stem kännetecknas av. Både kommersiella och öppna distribuerade filsystem undersöktes. Även en kostnadsuppskattning för kommersiella och öppna distribuerade filsystem gjordes för att ta reda på lönsamheten för dessa två typer av distribuerat filsystem.Efter att jämförelse och analys av olika tidigare arbeten utfördes, visade sig att det öppna distribue-rade filsystemet Ceph lämpade sig bra som en lösning utifrån kraven som sattes som mål för High Performance Storage och Virtual Machine Storage. Kostnadsuppskattningen visade att det var mer lönsamt att implementera ett öppet distribuerat filsystem. Denna undersökning kan användas som en vägledning vid val mellan olika distribuerade filsystem. / In this thesis, a study of three different uses cases has been made within the field of data storage, which are as following: Cold Storage, High Performance Storage and Virtual Machine Storage. The purpose of the survey is to give an overview of commercial distributed file systems and a deeper study of open source codes distributed file systems in order to find the most optimal solution for these use cases. Within the study, previous works concerning performance, data protection and costs were an-alyzed and compared in means to find different functionalities (snapshotting, multi-tenancy, data duplication and data replication) which distinguish modern distributed file systems. Both commercial and open distributed file systems were examined. A cost estimation for commercial and open distrib-uted file systems were made in means to find out the profitability for these two types of distributed file systems.After comparing and analyzing previous works, it was clear that the open source distributed file sys-tem Ceph was proper as a solution in accordance to the objectives that were set for High Performance Storage and Virtual Machine Storage. The cost estimation showed that it was more profitable to im-plement an open distributed file system. This study can be used as guidance to choose between different distributed file systems.