Orchestrating Heterogeneous Storage Services into a Coherent Virtualized Data Plane via Middleware Protocol Design

This paper presents an architectural framework for the dynamic composition of disparate storage services into a unified, logically consistent storage layer. Focusing on the information technology domain of middleware protocol design, we introduce a novel consistency protocol that enables the integration of existing cloud storage, edge caching proxies, and local file systems without modifying their underlying implementations. By decoupling consistency semantics, security enforcement, and policy management into a middleware overlay, the system virtualizes storage resources into a globally accessible, configurable Volume abstraction. We evaluate the performance overhead of this protocol in a distributed deployment across wide-area nodes, demonstrating that the middleware incurs minimal latency while preserving the scalability benefits of existing caching infrastructure. This work contributes a generalizable model for service composition in IT architectures, enabling applications to leverage heterogeneous commercial and private storage systems without sacrificing consistency or control.