COMP 3000 Essay 1 2010 Question 11: Difference between revisions
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Each year we are faced with growing storage needs as the world's information increases exponentially and business' are increasingly choosing to archive and retain all the data they produce. The storage industry has been able to keep up with demand with matching increases in storage capacity. Unfortunately the interfaces between clients and storage devices has remained unchanged since the 1950's. The dominate storage mechanism is still block-based storage technology. This has been sufficient for meeting most needs of modern businesses, but as we enter an age where "store everything, forever" is the common mantra of storage administrators and unstructured data with little meta-data is the norm, we have to look for technology that can provide better scalability, business intelligence, and management while ensuring security and data access speed of traditional storage solutions. | |||
Enter object based storage. Object storage uses objects that consists of data and meta-data that describe the object. They are accessed with defined methods such as read and write and carry a unique ID. They manage all necessary low-level storage, space management, and security functions. This storage technology has the potential to address some of the problems with block-based storage. | |||
With increased scalability, better security through per-object level access and insured integrity of data with unique hash key's for each object along with some benefits in management and business intelligence with rich meta-data, OSD can be seen as a viable alternative to improve the standard architectures of SAN and NAS networks. | |||
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Revision as of 15:05, 10 October 2010
Question
Why are object stores an increasingly attractive building block for filesystems (as opposed to block-based stores)? Explain.
Answer
Each year we are faced with growing storage needs as the world's information increases exponentially and business' are increasingly choosing to archive and retain all the data they produce. The storage industry has been able to keep up with demand with matching increases in storage capacity. Unfortunately the interfaces between clients and storage devices has remained unchanged since the 1950's. The dominate storage mechanism is still block-based storage technology. This has been sufficient for meeting most needs of modern businesses, but as we enter an age where "store everything, forever" is the common mantra of storage administrators and unstructured data with little meta-data is the norm, we have to look for technology that can provide better scalability, business intelligence, and management while ensuring security and data access speed of traditional storage solutions.
Enter object based storage. Object storage uses objects that consists of data and meta-data that describe the object. They are accessed with defined methods such as read and write and carry a unique ID. They manage all necessary low-level storage, space management, and security functions. This storage technology has the potential to address some of the problems with block-based storage.
With increased scalability, better security through per-object level access and insured integrity of data with unique hash key's for each object along with some benefits in management and business intelligence with rich meta-data, OSD can be seen as a viable alternative to improve the standard architectures of SAN and NAS networks.