Object Storage or an Object Store is a method of storing and managing data on disk that overcomes the limitation of standard disk arrays and filesystems. Effectively every piece of data is stored as free standing “object” as opposed to being placed into a hierarchy as is the case with file system based storage.
Object Storage uses commodity hardware and disks in expandable clustered nodes to enable the following key features.
Store any type of file based data from files through to multimedia.
Massively scalable without limitation due to hardware configuration or filesystem constraints.
Attach rich metadata to every file to make it searchable using multiple criteria.
Each Object also has a unique identifier which is used to make data retrieval very fast no matter how large the object store becomes.
Object Storage is the storage of the web, with file sharing services like Dropbox, Photos on Facebook and Music on Spotify. Perhaps the most famous example of a massive object store is AWS s# storage.
Because Object storage is built on clustered nodes, every file is saved in more than one physical location, ensuring a certain amount of redundancy and data protection is built in. Because there is not limitation on number of files that can handled, object storage can grow to many millions of files, yes due to the meta data rich indexing the data you need whether multimedia, log or standard files is retrievable at speed via very flexible and wide ranging search capability.
Multiple Disk vendors also offer corporate object storage solutions which offer all of the benefits of public or web based object storage but extra layers of security and sometime extra performance also thrown in.
As we create data through different sources such as social, multimedia, from devices and applications, Object Storage have become a very appropriate way to store and manage this less “structured” approach to creating data than is the case for a simple file based storage approach.
