Company Details

"Turning vast information into vital assets" is the vision of CU Coding Ltd. (CUC), an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) for applications by Network Coding technology. The core technology behind is invented and researched in CUHK for the last 20 years. Network Coding is a completion project in the Areas of Excellence (AoE) of the UGC, which is recognized internationally for the state-of-the-art technology.

nCloud: Software-Defined Distributed Storage on "Multiple Clouds"

We explore cloud diversity by striping data redundancy across multiple cloud storage services, so as to provide data availability and durability guarantees in the face of cloud outages, ultimately achieving fault-tolerant storage. The nCloud is a proof-of-concept prototype of a network-coding-based cloud storage system, aiming to provide fault tolerance and to reduce data repair costs when storing files using multi-cloud storage. nCloud uses a proxy-based design; interconnecting multiple cloud storage providers to export a file system interface that enables applications to seamlessly manage cloud storage through standard file system operations. nCloud builds on the Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes, a network coding scheme which maintains the same storage overhead as traditional erasure coding under the same data redundancy level, while minimising the amount of repair traffic (with up to 50% of reduction) and hence monetary costs due to data transfers.

We have implemented nCloud by storing and “striping” data diversely to achieve fault-tolerant storage across multiple cloud storage services by a proxy-based design. The benefits are:

a. Security: To any cloud service, nCloud will only store a portion but not the whole file. Any data is encoded and encrypted.
b. Disaster Recovery (DR): If any single node cloud service outage happens, nCloud can still be running.
c. Auto Recovery: When the node is back to service, nCloud will repair the node by saving 66.7% traffic than traditional approach.
d. Storage Saving: For 1:1 data replication, nCloud saves upto 80% disk space compared to traditional DR approaches.

We explore cloud diversity to achieve fault-tolerant storage by striping data redundancy across multiple cloud storage services, so as to provide data availability and durability guarantees in the face of cloud outages. The nCloud, a proof-of-concept prototype of a network-coding-based cloud storage system that aims at providing fault tolerance and reducing data repair cost when storing files using multi-cloud storage. nCloud uses a proxy-based design that interconnects multiple cloud storage providers and exports a file system interface that enables applications to seamlessly manage cloud storage through standard file system operations. nCloud builds on a network coding scheme called the Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes, which maintains the same storage overhead as traditional erasure coding under the same data redundancy level, while minimizing the amount of repair traffic (with up to 50% of reduction) and hence the monetary cost due to data transfers.