18 Facts About Object storage

Object storage is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks.

Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level, the system level, and the interface level.

In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures, like interfaces that are directly programmable by the application, a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data-management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity.

Object storage systems allow retention of massive amounts of unstructured data in which data is written once and read once.

Object storage is used for purposes such as storing objects like videos and photos on Facebook, songs on Spotify, or files in online collaboration services, such as Dropbox.

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One of the limitations with object storage is that it is not intended for transactional data, as object storage was not designed to replace NAS file access and sharing; it does not support the locking and sharing mechanisms needed to maintain a single, accurately updated version of a file.

Object storage was proposed at Gibson's Carnegie Mellon University lab as a research project in 1996.

Fine grained access control through object storage architecture was further described by one of the NASD team, Howard Gobioff, who later was one of the inventors of the Google File System.

One of the design principles of object storage is to abstract some of the lower layers of storage away from the administrators and applications.

Object storage allows the addressing and identification of individual objects by more than just file name and file path.

Object storage adds a unique identifier within a bucket, or across the entire system, to support much larger namespaces and eliminate name collisions.

Object storage provides programmatic interfaces to allow applications to manipulate data.

Some object storage implementations go further, supporting additional functionality like object versioning, object replication, life-cycle management and movement of objects between different tiers and types of storage.

Some early incarnations of object storage were used for archiving, as implementations were optimized for data services like immutability, not performance.

Newer object storage systems have gotten some traction, particularly around very large custom applications like eBay's auction site, where EMC Atmos is used to manage over 500 million objects a day.

Cloud Object storage has become pervasive as many new web and mobile applications choose it as a common way to store binary data.

Traditional block Object storage interface uses a series of fixed size blocks which are numbered starting at 0.

Object storage stores are similar to key-value stores in two respects.