A Tale of Two Object Stores

New storage systems have joined the ranks of object stores, but they're really more general purpose storage devices that use some object storage concepts.

Howard Marks

November 6, 2013

1 Min Read
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As the volume of unstructured data they need to store has grown over the past few years, organizations have discovered that their data is pushing up to, or over, the limitations of classic block and file based storage systems. Object storage systems, such as Amplidata’s AmpliStor, Data Direct Networks' WOS, and Amazon’s S3, provide the ability to store huge numbers of objects across exabytes of disks.

More recently, the designers of new storage systems are using object storage concepts on the back end of their systems while actually providing more traditional block or file access.

Traditional object stores -- although it seems a bit strange to call object stores traditional -- present their data through RESTful, HTTP-based Get/Put APIs. Relieved of the overhead of maintaining a hierarchical directory structure and having to support in-place data updates with all the locking overhead that implies, object stores can more easily scale-out to enormous dimensions.

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About the Author(s)

Howard Marks

Network Computing Blogger

Howard Marks</strong>&nbsp;is founder and chief scientist at Deepstorage LLC, a storage consultancy and independent test lab based in Santa Fe, N.M. and concentrating on storage and data center networking. In more than 25 years of consulting, Marks has designed and implemented storage systems, networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, J.P. Morgan, Borden Foods, U.S. Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide, Foxwoods Resort Casino and the State University of New York at Purchase. The testing at DeepStorage Labs is informed by that real world experience.</p><p>He has been a frequent contributor to <em>Network Computing</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>InformationWeek</em>&nbsp;since 1999 and a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Interop and Microsoft's TechEd since 1990. He is the author of&nbsp;<em>Networking Windows</em>&nbsp;and co-author of&nbsp;<em>Windows NT Unleashed</em>&nbsp;(Sams).</p><p>He is co-host, with Ray Lucchesi of the monthly Greybeards on Storage podcast where the voices of experience discuss the latest issues in the storage world with industry leaders.&nbsp; You can find the podcast at: http://www.deepstorage.net/NEW/GBoS

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