The New Wave On The Cloud: Object Based Storage

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Syed Raza.

Is your data exponentially growing? Are you using orthodox storage systems like Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS)? Cloud computing with its numerous benefits and innovative capabilities now offers a novel way of working with data through ‘Object based storage model’. Due to the ever increasing pressure exerted by the industry on the interface to storage, the storage technology has progressed to the point that a change in the device interface is needed. Well, the answer perhaps lies with object based storage, an emerging standard aimed to address this problem. Let’s further elaborate about object based storage.

Objects can be categorized as either:

• history
• Files
• Blocks…

While files provide user applications with a higher-level storage abstraction that enables secure data sharing across different operating system platforms, blocks offer fast, scalable access to shared data. Having said that, the third related aspect is the all-important metadata which is basically data providing information about one or more aspects of the data, such as means of creation, purpose, time and date of creation, location, and author of the data. In a nutshell, object-based storage separates metadata from object data, storing it all on one level, rather than as a hierarchy as with traditional file-based storage…

Read more from the source @ http://cloudtweaks.com/2014/06/new-wave-cloud-object-based-storage/