Microsoft Corporation
Immutable storage for cloud service providers

Abstract:

A cloud service provider supports immutable data on its servers and the immutable data is movable across multiple access tiers, in which each access tier affects access performance and cost. In typical implementations, the immutable data may be blobs of unstructured data such as text or binary data, multimedia, among other data types, which are organized into containers that provide a directory for user interaction with the data. Policies are applied at the container-level which regulates user interactions with the containers and the container's blobs. A policy can, for example, prohibit modification and deletion of blobs within a container until a policy's set retention period expires. After expiration of the retention period, the container and that container's blobs may be deleted, but blob modification may still be prohibited. A user interface is configured to enable a user to move containers to other access tiers while the container maintains its policy.