International Journal of Information Studies Mohammed Fazil Ali, Ahmed Muhammad Barnawi1, Abul Bashar 4 3 2000 https://www.dline.info/ijis/fulltext/v4n3/ijisv4n3_4.pdf This paper presents a novel evaluation study of various strategies for modeling and simulating cloud computing systems in order to assess their performance. Considering the exponential growth in the deployment of cloud computing systems worldwide and the need for their proper evaluation, this work provides three major contributions through comprehensive performance evaluations. Firstly, it proposes a novel 10-point performance evaluation framework for existing Cloud Storage infrastructure and applies it for evaluating major Cloud Storage Service Providers. Secondly, it presents a detailed evaluation of 18 most popular Cloud Storage Hardware vendors with respect to the storage technologies they incorporate. Thirdly, it provides a comprehensive survey of prominent simulation tools which are used for simulation and modeling of Cloud Computing systems. In conclusion, it takes stock of the current trends on optimizing storage infrastructure for Cloud Computing and predicting future research possibilities in this rapidly growing technology.