DATASTORES SUPPORTING COLLABORATIVE WORKSPACES IN A CLOUD COMPUTING E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Cloud computing is now a mature technology with a high degree of adoption by a wide area of institutions and companies, regardless of their size. Having its philosophy built around essential characteristics like on-demand self service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured services and having a convenient pay-as-you-go financial model, it has become an attractive platform for an increased number of activities. Higher education and e-learning are no exceptions and they fully benefit from its technical and economical advantages. The economical crisis have led to drastic reduction of the education budgets, the educational institution changed their focus to some effective and affordable solutions. E-learning environments provisioned in the cloud have demonstrated to be an inspired movement due to variable and decreased operational costs combined with the highly available and reliable provided infrastructure. An essential component of an e-learning environment is a collaborative workspace allowing the participants of the educational process to take part to an interesting and interactive experience, regardless of their physical location. These collaborative workspaces are sustained by powerful storage systems designed to perform in highly distributed environments, aiming to offer great performances in terms of data processing and scalability. This paper focuses on evaluating some of these databases in terms of performance and features, in order to integrate them in a collaborative workspace designed to work in a Cloud computing environment. An architecture for data storage supporting the collaborative environment is proposed and various aspects related to the data model and data security are discussed.