Talk:COMP 3000 Essay 1 2010 Question 11
Quick Overview
So I hope i'm not the only one who was wondering "What are object stores?" when reading the question. I don't think the textbook mentions it but I didn't read through the filesystems chapter very thoroughly. Here's where some quick googling has got me:
Most storage devices divide their storage up into blocks, a fixed length sequence of bytes. The interface that storage devices provide to the rest of the system is pretty simple. It's essentially "Here, you can read to or write to blocks, have fun". This is block-based storage.
Object-based storage is different. The interface it presents to the rest of the system is more sophisticated. Instead of directly accessing blocks on the disk, the system accesses objects. Objects are like a level of abstraction on top of blocks. Objects can be variable sized, read/written to, created, and deleted. The device itself handles mapping these objects to blocks and all the issues that come with that, rather than the OS.
Here's some papers that give an overview of object-based storage:
Object Storage: The Future Building Block for Storage Systems
I think if you just look those up on google scholar you can access the pdf without even being inside carleton's network.
--Mbingham 23:56, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Some more links
I haven't been reading many academic papers on the subject so those links will be very useful.
If I may add to this. I read an overview of object storage here: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/object-storage-overview.pdf and http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/2010/spring/file/PaulMassiglia_File_Systems_Object_Storage_Devices.pdf
I can add that metadata is much richer in an object store context. Searching for files and grouping related files together is much easier with the context information that metadata for objects store. I'm beginning to read: http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp_536.pdf which talks about the advantages of OSD's.
--Myagi 10:39, 5 October 2010 (UTC)