• INRIA PhD Student: Bogdan Nicolae

On cloud infrastructures, IaaS technologies (e.g., Nimbus) rely on virtualization techniques to offer resources to clients. Clients are typically al- lowed to upload a virtual-machine image to the system, so that they could use an en- vironment compatible with their applications. This image is then executed on each computing element rented to the client.

In such a context, BlobSeer is used as a storage system for checkpointing images of the virtual machines, and thus help building a highly-available IaaS. The idea is simple: rather then using local storage, cloud checkpointing services store virtual-machine instances as binary large objects (BLOBs) using a globally shared namespace built using BlobSeer. BlobSeer natively provides versioning support for all objects it stores. A new (incremental) version of a BLOB is created each time a write operation is performed: this feature is efficiently used for incremental checkpointing of virtual machines managed by Nimbus.