What is Object Storage?

September 21, 2021

Table of Contents

Introduction –

Storage has become a significant part of our daily technological advancement. Without storage, we can't imagine our data security or data in transit. Conventional storage systems like file storage or block storage are very static. Object storage came into action around the mid-90s and became a buzzword in the last decade. In this article, we will understand the term object storage, its architecture, and the benefits it can provide.

What is Object Storage?

Object storage or object-based storage is a technique of putting and consequently retrieving data as clusters of single data. It is a technology that bundles data and manages them as objects. It comes with metadata tags (that are customizable) & a unique identifier. The best part is that we can feed in a lot of identifiable information for each data stored as an object. This form of storage treats data as atomic units. All these granular units get stored in a flat address space that makes locating and retrieving data easy.

These types of object-based data are easily accessible through HTTP/HTTPS requests or API calls. The unique identifying number in object storage helps in making API calls for accessing the data. Such a mechanism of data storage helps in safeguarding the data. The flat address space also aids in scalability, and hence organizations can efficiently replicate data stored to multiple data centres. Data in object storage leverages TCP/IP as its transport protocol when the objects are in transit.

What are Cloud-based object storage solutions?

Cloud-based object storage is a particular form of data responsible for storing unstructured data. Cloud-based object storage solutions embed well with hybrid storage architecture or on-premise storage systems. This flexibility is possible because organizations can access data through API calls. Also, these data objects do not demand extra cloud-based computing. One can append or exclude these object storages because it can dynamically scale as per requirement. So, if you are looking for any cloud-based object storage, E2E Cloud (https://www.e2enetworks.com/e2e-object-storage/) has the best solutions for you.

Architecture principles Object storage follows –

As per the market research of ESG, object storage systems with large-scale support come with the following architectural principles -

Programmable: Organizations can use object storage data through restful API calls and via HTTPS requests. Developers can access this data and perform different actions on storage pools through codes. Even though storage object data remains scattered in a large storage pool, developers can query these objects using metadata.

Consumption meter like the cloud: Object-based data storage (whether an on-premise or a cloud-based service) provides a way to measure storage usage across different sectors of an organization. It helps in billing each division separately and keeping track through the meter.

Flexible: Most object storage architecture is flexible enough to integrate a variety of storage devices and platforms. It can merge heterogeneous storage units and hardware components under one storage pool. Also, object storage architecture can extend from the public cloud to on-site private storage units and vice versa without much hassle. Furthermore, it is flexible enough to hold structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data also.

Simplicity: Object-based storage is easy to implement & demands the least effort for its maintenance. We can fully automate various operations on data like healing data aggregates, clustering of data, etc.

Benefits of Object Storage

Storing and managing unstructured data at scale: Unstructured data usually doesn’t fit in traditional database systems. For managing the bulk amount of unstructured data, cloud object storage is the best option. With the increase in file storage, the complexity and data retrieval attainments are minimized. But object storage leverages flat storage architecture, which avoids performance deterioration.

Web hosting and Website files: Object storage can host your static web app assets like images, videos, user data, etc. Also, it can make static website hosting pretty straightforward with little maintenance.

Customizable Metadata:  Organizations can configure cloud object storage with customized metadata. Metadata helps in defining the object file's data. It also improves the data search and can effectively process machine learning algorithms for insights and predictive analysis.

Disaster recovery and availability: Organizations can configure cloud object storage to replicate content and scatter it over large storage pools. Thus, if one disk cluster fails, it will preserve data availability and ensure that the storage system runs without interruption.

Conclusion –

Unstructured data repositories hold images, videos, multimedia files that organizations store in high-cost storage. It not only reduces business data storage costs but also helps in the effective management of data growth. So, if you are looking for an effective unstructured data storage solution, E2E Cloud has object storage services for you.

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