It hasn’t been that long, really, since most companies dealt mostly with data that could be measured in gigabytes. Today, businesses are commonly dealing with terabytes and petabytes – and larger companies are working with much more. Traditional storage architectures often were not designed to deal with these quantities of data, and many businesses are already looking beyond — to the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which exabytes of data aren’t uncommon at all. Many companies are looking for an alternative, innovative storage solution that addresses these enormous capacities and meets their cost goals. The answer is object storage.
What is Object Storage?
As organizational storage needs move beyond gigabytes and terabytes into petabytes, and in many cases more, object storage provides an easily scalable solution that does not hinder performance.
Object storage (sometimes also called object-based storage), is an architecture that deals with pieces of data as objects, instead of the traditional way in which data is handled as a hierarchal file system or as blocks. Traditionally, in most storage systems as more and more capacity was added to the storage controller the performance went down considerably. Additionally, traditional storage was frequently inflexible, and to use it you were often locked into a proprietary infrastructure. That meant that changing your infrastructure required massive migration, which is troublesome and costly. Object storage is typically software-defined, freeing your business from any specific proprietary hardware.
How is Object Storage Different Than Traditional Storage?
Object storage is not dependent on any manufacturer’s hardware and even has features that can help improve your data security.
Object storage is much more scalable than file storage because it is vastly simpler. Object storage technology evenly distributes workloads across all compute resources (hardware, processing power, disk drives, etc.). It can be scaled upwards to increase capacity without hurting performance, because the infrastructure simply adds compute resources to accommodate spikes in demand. Object storage also allows you to access the data from anywhere over HTTP communication using S3 or Swift protocols, and objects are retrieved by their ID’s regardless of where they are stored. So, this storage technology not only gives you massive scalability, it also gives you options for how to access your data. Object storage is very very reliable as it protects the data by keeping several copies of each object.
What are Some Use Cases for Object Storage?
Is object storage right for your organization? Object storage is a perfect solution for a large amount of (relatively) static data. This storage technology is perfect for taking on big data and the IoT, because it efficiently handles large loads of unstructured data sets, including text files, social media data, images and videos, audio files, etc. Object storage is also ideal for storing backups and archiving that will be easy and fast to restore when needed. It is also an excellent solution for any enormous set of data, such as financial transactions, sensors data, and other big data.
Object storage is a strong player in industries like pharmaceuticals, media, and social media, where they need to store things like large quantities of video footage or research and historical data. For the above examples, object storage is by far a better and more efficient solution than any other storage option, while other workloads such as databases will work better with block or file based storage..
Object storage is available via STaaS (storage as a service), and is offered both as an on-premises and an offsite cloud solution. Learn more about it when you download the ‘STaaS vs Traditional Storage’ infographic. 
