Storage CloudSim - A Simulation Environment for Cloud Object Storage Infrastructures

Since Cloud services are billed by the pay-as-you-go principle, organizations can save huge investment costs. Hence, they want to know, what costs will arise by the usage of those services. On the other hand, Cloud providers want to provide the best-matching hardware configurations for different use-cases. Therefore, CloudSim, a popular event-based framework, was developed to model and simulate the usage of IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) Clouds. Metrics like usage costs, resource utilization and energy consumption can be also investigated using CloudSim. But this favored simulation framework does not provide any mechanisms to simulate todays object storage based Cloud-services (STaaS, Storage-as-a-Service). In this paper, we propose a storage extension for CloudSim to enable the simulations of STaaS-components. Interactions between users and the modeled STaaS Clouds are inspired by the CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) standard. In order to validate our extension, we evaluated the resource utilization and costs that arise by the usage of STaaS Clouds based on different simulation scenarios.