Understanding The Object Storage Landscape

Cloud object storage is transforming to adapt to new technology trends. Learn more about its traditional functions, new changes and use cases here.

The amount of data created every year continues to grow at exponential rates. Object storage came into the IT industry in the 1990s when high-performance computing researchers needed scalable options for their massive data sets. Moreover, the growing, scalable cloud services lead to the popularity of object storage in the market.

Traditional Functions Of Object Storage

1. It should adapt to frequent component failures for storage systems requiring many nodes via continual monitoring, error detection, fault tolerance and automatic recovery.
2. Object storage should accommodate massive, multi-terabyte data sets and multi-gigabyte files.
3. It should optimize for files that are predominantly read-only, sequentially read, and have "practically nonexistent" random writes. Therefore, allowing new data to append the file rather than overwriting existing data.

New Trends In IT And Data

Over time, enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies and cloud infrastructure increasingly. These trends bring about significant changes in how IT data is managed and maintained. A lot of these changes seem to be in favour of object storage. Here are some noteworthy transformations:

1. There is enormous growth in the volume of unstructured data like text, images, audio and video.
2. Similarly, semistructured data is also increasing. This form of data is accumulated from system logs, email repositories and tagged information like HTML and JavaScript Object Notation documents.
3. Hundreds of users from multiple locations continue to gain concurrent, real-time storage access.
4. The increase in popularity of techniques that aggregate data, like the use of data lakes and such other methods from various sources in different formats.
5. The accompanying decoupling of data from a particular application, with the same repository used by many workloads, is on the rise.

Upcoming Use Cases For Object Storage

Since object storage is highly scalable, distributed and more efficient, the above-listed trends prefer it over the file or block storage. Moreover, modern object storage is adapting to new technology. Consequently, several new use cases for it are on the horizon:

1. Data lakes for streaming data, such as system events and logs, application telemetry, sensor readings, financial transactions, online interactions, and other metadata.
2. Object storage databases for metadata, unstructured content and large binary objects.
3. Machine and deep learning training data and input streams for analytics using previously trained models.
4. Act as repositories for software development environments, including source code management, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, issue tracking and documentation.

Object Storage For Your Cloud

Based on the OpenStack project, Swift, and our advanced dashboard control panel, our cloud object storage provides you with a simple and easy to use interface. You can store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the internet. Our pay as you go platform allows you to get started without any upfront cost, setup fees, or minimum costs. You only pay for the storage you use.

The design of our cloud storage service enables exceptional service availability. Contact us to know more exciting features of our cloud infrastructure service.