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TopThe cloud storage market is now crowded with different service providers. There are plenty of services to choose from. Many articles introduced how to choose new cloud storage services. Vince compared the most well known cloud storage providers, including Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and Box.net (Cloud storage comparison, n.d.). He compared the capacity and functionality of different providers. And there is a comparison of 51 different online backup services (Wikipedia, n.d.). Most of these studies compare the free and paid space, support platform, convenience, and security.
Too many think of cloud storage as just another or the next type of storage. As usual with this view, it is associated with a view that the “next” storage type is bigger, faster and cheaper. As such, proponents of this view generally believe that access via traditional approaches, like WebDAV, NFS, CIFS, and others, is a critical capability (Cloud Storage Strategy, 2009). Performance is an important factor for storage devices. Cloud storage providers offer abundant interfaces for different purposes (e.g., REST, File System, SQL like query). However, the novel interfaces (usually neither SQL nor POSIX), elasticity, and new use cases of cloud serving systems motivate a new benchmark.