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

Object-Based Storage

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 articles on object storage here:

Object Storage Overview

and

File Systems for OSD's

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 supplies for objects. I'm beginning to read:

The advantages of OSD's

--Myagi 10:39, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to write a version of my essay out over the long weekend with headings and references and put it up on the wiki. I'd like to know who and how many people are working on this essay but dunno if that's possible. We'll see what we do from there I guess? I was thinking we just homogenize all of the information we write into one unified essay.

You don't need to write your own independent essay on the wiki. Let's just add info as it comes along. I'll be completely without internet access this weekend, but I'll try to bring some background reading with me. Expect lots of edits from me starting Monday night/Tuesday morning.

--Dagar 12:59, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

--Myagi 10:42, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

I think there's 6 people in our group, though there might only be 5. I'll be working on this over the long weekend too. I was thinking maybe we should try to get a rough outline up, thursday or friday. Since Prof Somayaji mentioned that this should have the format of an essay, maybe we could start with what our main argument is?

I was thinking something like objects stores are becoming more attractive because the demands on filesystems has changed, but the interface has not been updated to accomodate these changes. Then we could go into an explanation of block based storage, how it fails to meet the needs placed on modern FSs, then how object stores solves these problems. What do you think?

--Mbingham 01:55, 7 October 2010 (UTC)