What is object storage?

Object storage is a data storage control and manipulation technique that handles data storage as discrete objects. It incorporates the data that makes up a file, adds all of the file’s related information, and assigns a customer identifier to the file. Object storage provides data availability by replicating multiple copies of the data across multiple nodes. If one of the nodes crashes, the data is still available, and there is no downtime. For integrity, each data block is mirrored on several appliances. This allows for more expansive storage spaces and simplified data access.

History

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider invented Cloud computing in the 1960s through his work on ARPANET, which connected people and data from anywhere at any time. CompuServe began giving its customers a limited amount of storage space in 1983 so they could store any file that they wished to upload.

Uses of object storage

Object storage applies detailed metadata to files, removing the tiered file system found in file storage and putting it into a common address space known as a storage pool. This metadata is critical to the performance of object storage because it allows for an in-depth review of the data in the storage pool.

Object storage vs. block storage

Object storage in AWS

Users can handle their storage in one location with AWS object storage solutions, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Glacier, as an easy-to-use application interface. Policies can be used to minimize storage costs by dynamically tiering between separate storage groups.

Features of object storage

• Large and small scalability Object stores, as previously stated, are designed to scale larger than conventional data stores (like scale-out NAS)
• Data Security
• Sorting, Encoding, and Metadata
• Efficiency * Regulation & Auditing
• Deployment Models

Hadoop

Hadoop, like object storage, was developed as a scale-out system on low-cost commodity hardware. The Hadoop File System (HDFS) was built around the idea that computation could be transferred closer to data, so data is stored on a locally attached disc on the compute nodes.

Object storage bucket

A bucket is a container for preserving objects in a compartment inside an Object Storage namespace in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage service. A bucket refers to a specific compartment.