The Ascent of Object Storage

Cloud Computing and the Process Integration Era

By G C Network | December 17, 2008

The Industry Advisory Council (IAC) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to fostering improved communications and understanding between government and industry. through its affiliation with the American Council for Technology…

The Tactical Cloud

By G C Network | December 16, 2008

When cloud computing first came in vogue, there was a rather serious discussion about the private cloud concept. The whole idea of cloud computing seemed to argue against implementing such…

“Cloud Musings” Now on SYS-CON Media “Cloud Computing Journal” !!

By G C Network | December 15, 2008

I’m happy to announce that a recent “Cloud Musings” article, “Commercial vs Federal Cloud Computing ” has been reposted on SYS-CON Media’s “Cloud Computing Journal“. Thank you SYS-CON for making…

How to make clouds interoperable and standard !!

By G C Network | December 12, 2008

This has been a huge part of my life over the past few weeks! This is my personal view. WARNING: DON’T EXPECT THE ANSWER TO BE FOUND BELOW !!! There…

The Tension between Public and Private Clouds

By G C Network | December 11, 2008

Last week, during discussion on cloud interoperability and standards in Israel, I saw for the first time a real dichotomy in the value of public (external) and private (internal) clouds.…

Cloud Computing for Continuity of Operations (COOP)

By G C Network | December 10, 2008

Recently, I’ve been focusing on cloud computing for COOP. The way I looked at it, many government agencies are already using commercial shared facilities as COOP sites and that the…

NCOIC Plenary Session

By G C Network | December 9, 2008

Hopping a plane to the west coast today to attend the NCOIC Plenary in Costa Mesa, California. First day “Cloud Computing for Net-Centric Operations” agenda includes: David Ryan, Chief Architect…

Dataline named “Top 100 Cloud Computing Company”

By G C Network | December 9, 2008

SYS-CON’s Cloud Computing Journal included Dataline in its expanded list of the most active players in the cloud ecosystem. In adding Dataline to the “Top 100” list, Jeremy Geelan noted…

Autoscaling into the cloud- Good or Bad?

By G C Network | December 8, 2008

I always thought saw the ability to autoscale into a cloud infrastructure as a good thing. George Reese presented a differing view on the O’Reilly blog recently. “Auto-scaling is the…

Cloudera must be reading the script!

By G C Network | December 4, 2008

“Cloud computing leapt out as the most obvious way to address enterprise large data problems” – Ken Pierce, IT Specialist, DIA-DS/C4ISR “We view Hadoop as the key enabler…[in] optimizing the…

Over the past few years, the data storage market has changed radically. The traditional hierarchy of directories, sub-directories, and files referred to as file storage has given way to object storage, individual storage objects. While file storage was designed to help humans interact with data, object storage is all about automated efficiency.
User expectation of data usage drives file storage repository design.  In this structured data model, all folders and names are organized to support a pre-defined business process or model. The file system also associates a limited amount of metadata (i.e., file name, creation date, creator, file type) with the saved file. Finding individual files is done either manually or programmatically by working through the hierarchy. The file storage approach works well with data collections but can become very cumbersome as data volume grows.
Object storage, on the other hand, is optimized for an unstructured data model. While this approach is not “human-friendly” it also doesn’t require prior knowledge or expectations of data use. Files are stored as objects in various locations with a unique identifier and a significant amount of metadata. The size of the accompanying metadata can range from kilobytes to gigabytes and often includes a content summary, keywords, key points, comments, locations of associated objects, data protection policies, security, access, geographic locations and more. Enhanced metadata enables a lower level of granularity when protecting, manipulate, and managing stored objects.
Specific business, technology, and economic drivers caused this significant market change. Business drivers include:
  • Rapid growth in amount and importance of unstructured data
  • Need to implement faster data retrieval based on identifying details incorporated in metadata that the operating system reads.
  • The requirementto apply organization to unstructured data resource through the use of text analytics, auto-categorization, and auto-tagging.
  • Increased legal and regulatory requirements for scalable data archiving and e-discovery
  • Enhanced business process and model flexibility enabled by the use of a flat storage structure.
From a technical point of view, object storage is far superior to file systems. This advantage is primarily due to its unlimited scalability and ability to be managed programmatically. It also:
  • Has fewer limitations when compared to the traditional file or block-based systems because of the flat data environment
  • Ability to customize metadata through arbitrary use of any number of data attributes
  • Global accessibility using HTTP(S) and REST APIs
From an economic point of view, object storage is also more cost-effective than file storage solutions, especially when storing large amounts of data. Since object storage solutions efficiently leverage unlimited scalability, organizations find that it is less costly to store all of their data. This advantage also exists in private cloud implementations where costs can be even lower than that provided by public cloud providers. Object storage is also much more durable than file-based alternatives.
The marketplace offers plenty of alternatives when object storage is the right answer. Access protocols, technology, and cost, however, varies widely. As shown in Table 1, storage cost for 1 terabyte of data for one year ranges from a high of $4,300.80 with data striping from QualityTech/QTS to a low of $47.88 from Wasabithat uses a more advanced erasure codingapproach. While location differences cause some cost variation, most of the variation can be attributed to design architecture and underlying storage technology.
 
Although this market survey is not exhaustive by any means, it highlights the importance of being an educated consumer when considering object storage solutions.  Other solutions aspects worth investigating include:
  • Complexity and performance across provider storage service tiers
  • Data immutability and durability
  • Speed of internal consistency across multiple copies of your data
  • Elapsed time to the delivery of the first byte of requested data
  • Use of active integrity checking
By all objective accounts, object storage is the right storage for large segments of an organization’s data holdings. This reality should lead to more effective due diligence and care when considering your enterprise’s next storage upgrade.


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