3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

Object storage
Object storage (also known as object-based storage[1]) is a computer data storage architecture that manages data as
objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manage data as a file hierarchy, and block storage
which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks.[2] Each object typically includes the data itself, a variable amount
of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device
level (object-storage device), 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 can be 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. Object storage is used for purposes such
as storing photos on Facebook, songs on Spotify, or files in online collaboration services, such as Dropbox.[3]

Contents
History
Origins
Development
Architecture
Abstraction of storage
Inclusion of rich custom metadata within the object
Programmatic data management
Implementation
Object-based storage devices
Object-based file systems
Archive storage
Cloud storage
"Captive" object storage
Hybrid storage
Virtual object storage
Object-storage systems
Market adoption
Market analysis
Standards
Object-based storage device standards
OSD version 1
OSD version 2

Differences between key-value and object stores

See also
References
External links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 1/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

History

Origins
In 1995, research led by Garth Gibson on Network-Attached Secure Disks first promoted the concept of splitting less
common operations, like namespace manipulations, from common operations, like reads and writes, to optimize the
performance and scale of both.[4] In the same year, 1995, a Belgian company - FilePool - was established to build the basis
for archiving functions. Object storage was proposed at Gibson's Carnegie Mellon University lab as a research project in
1996 .[5] Another key concept was abstracting the writes and reads of data to more flexible data containers (objects). Fine
grained access control through object storage architecture[6] was further described by one of the NASD team, Howard
Gobioff, who later was one of the inventors of the Google File System.[7] Other related work includes the Coda filesystem
project at Carnegie Mellon, which started in 1987, and spawned the Lustre file system.[8] There is also the OceanStore
project at UC Berkeley,[9] which started in 1999.[10]

Centera, debuted in 2002.[11] The technology called content-addressable storage, was developed at Filepool, acquired by
EMC Corporation in 2001.[12]

Development
From 1999 to 2013, at least $300 million of venture financing was related to object storage, including vendors like
Amplidata, Bycast, Cleversafe, Cloudian, Nirvanix, and Scality.[13] This does not include engineering from systems vendors
like DataDirect Networks (WOS), Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, Centera, Atmos, HDS (HCP), IBM, NetApp
(StorageGRID), Redhat GlusterFS, cloud services vendors like Amazon (AWS S3), Microsoft (Microsoft Azure) and Google
(Google Cloud Storage), or open-source development at Lustre, OpenStack (Swift), MogileFS, Ceph and
OpenIO.[14][15][16][17] An article illustrating products' timeline was published in July 2016.[18]

Architecture

Abstraction of storage
One of the design principles of object storage is to abstract some of the lower
layers of storage away from the administrators and applications. Thus, data is
exposed and managed as objects instead of files or blocks. Objects contain
additional descriptive properties which can be used for better indexing or
management. Administrators do not have to perform lower-level storage
functions like constructing and managing logical volumes to utilize disk
capacity or setting RAID levels to deal with disk failure.

Object storage also allows the addressing and identification of individual objects by more than just file name and file
path.[19] Object storage adds a unique identifier within a bucket, or across the entire system, to support much larger
namespaces and eliminate name collisions.

Inclusion of rich custom metadata within the object

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 2/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

Object storage explicitly separates file metadata from data to support additional capabilities. As opposed to fixed metadata
in file systems (filename, creation date, type, etc.), object storage provides for full function, custom, object-level metadata
in order to:

Capture application-specific or user-specific information for better indexing purposes

Support data-management policies (e.g. a policy to drive object movement from one storage tier to another)
Centralize management of storage across many individual nodes and clusters
Optimize metadata storage (e.g. encapsulated, database or key value storage) and caching/indexing (when
authoritative metadata is encapsulated with the metadata inside the object) independently from the data storage (e.g.
unstructured binary storage)
Additionally, in some object-based file-system implementations:

The file system clients only contact metadata servers once when the file is opened and then get content directly via
object-storage servers (vs. block-based file systems which would require constant metadata access)
Data objects can be configured on a per-file basis to allow adaptive stripe width, even across multiple object-storage
servers, supporting optimizations in bandwidth and I/O
Object-based storage devices (OSD) as well as some software implementations (e.g., Caringo Swarm) manage
metadata and data at the storage device level:

Instead of providing a block-oriented interface that reads and writes fixed sized blocks of data, data is organized into
flexible-sized data containers, called objects
Each object has both data (an uninterpreted sequence of bytes) and metadata (an extensible set of attributes
describing the object); physically encapsulating both together benefits recoverability.
The command interface includes commands to create and delete objects, write bytes and read bytes to and from
individual objects, and to set and get attributes on objects
Security mechanisms provide per-object and per-command access control

Programmatic data management

Object storage provides programmatic interfaces to allow applications to manipulate data. At the base level, this includes
CRUD functions for basic read, write and delete operations. Some object storage implementations go further, supporting
additional functionality like object versioning, object replication, and movement of objects between different tiers and
types of storage. Most API implementations are ReST-based, allowing the use of many standard HTTP calls.

Implementation

Object-based storage devices

Object storage at the protocol and device layer was proposed 20 years ago and approved for the SCSI command set nearly
10 years ago as "Object-based Storage Device Commands" (OSD),[20] but had not been productized until the development
of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform.[21][22] The SCSI command set for Object Storage Devices was developed by a
working group of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) for the T10 committee of the International
Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).[23] T10 is responsible for all SCSI standards.

Object-based file systems

Some distributed file systems use an object-based architecture, where file metadata is stored in metadata servers and file
data is stored in object storage servers. File system client software interacts with the distinct servers, and abstracts them to
present a full file system to users and applications. IBM Spectrum Scale (also known as GPFS), Dell EMC Elastic Cloud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 3/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

Storage (http://www.emc.com/en-us/storage/ecs/index.htm#collapse=&tab14=0), Ceph, XtreemFS, and Lustre are

examples of this type of object storage.

Archive storage
Some early incarnations of object storage were used for archiving, as implementations were optimized for data services
like immutability, not performance. EMC Centera and Hitachi HCP (formerly known as HCAP) are two commonly cited
object storage products for archiving. Another example is Quantum Lattus Object Storage Platform.

Cloud storage
The vast majority of cloud storage available in the market leverages an object-storage architecture. Two notable examples
are Amazon Web Services S3, which debuted in 2005, and Rackspace Files (whose code was released as OpenStack Swift).

"Captive" object storage

Some large Internet companies developed their own software when object-storage products were not commercially
available or use cases were very specific. Facebook famously invented their own object-storage software, code-named
Haystack, to address their particular massive-scale photo management needs efficiently.[24]

Hybrid storage
A few object-storage systems, such as Ceph, GlusterFS, Cloudian,[25] IBM Spectrum Scale,[26] and Scality support Unified
File and Object (UFO) storage, allowing some clients to store objects on a storage system while simultaneously other
clients store files on the same storage system. While "hybrid storage" is not a widely accepted term for this concept,
interoperable interfaces to the same set of data are becoming available in some object-storage products.

Virtual object storage

In addition to object-storage systems that own the managed files, some systems provide an object abstraction on top of
one or more traditional filesystem based solutions. These solutions do not own the underlaying raw storage, but instead
actively mirror the filesystem changes and replicate them in their own object catalog, alongside any metadata that can be
automatically extracted from the files. Users can then contribute additional metadata through the virtual object storage
APIs. A global namespace and replication capabilities both inside and across filesystems are typically supported.

Notable examples in this category are Nirvana, and its open-source cousin iRODS.

Most products in this category have recently extended their capabilities to support other Object Store solutions as well.

Object-storage systems
More general-purpose object-storage systems came to market around 2008. Lured by the incredible growth of "captive"
storage systems within web applications like Yahoo Mail and the early success of cloud storage, object-storage systems
promised the scale and capabilities of cloud storage, with the ability to deploy the system within an enterprise, or at an
aspiring cloud-storage service provider. Notable examples of object-storage systems include NetApp StorageGRID,[27]
EMC Atmos, OpenStack Swift, Scality RING, Caringo Swarm[28] (formerly CAStor), Cloudian,[25] OpenIO,[14] and
Minio.[29]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 4/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

Market adoption
One of the first object-storage products, Lustre, is used in 70% of the Top 100
supercomputers and ~50% of the Top 500.[30] As of June 16, 2013, this
includes 7 of the top 10, including the current fastest system on the list -
China's Tianhe-2 and the second fastest, the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (pictured on the right).[31]
The Titan supercomputer at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory
Object-storage systems had good adoption in the early 2000s as an archive
platform, particularly in the wake of compliance laws like Sarbanes-Oxley.
After five years in the market, EMC's Centera product claimed over 3,500 customers and 150 petabytes shipped by
2007.[32] Hitachi's HCP product also claims many petabyte-scale customers.[33] Newer object storage systems have also
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.[34] As of March 3, 2014, EMC claims to have sold over 1.5 exabytes of
Atmos storage.[35] On July 1, 2014, Los Alamos National Lab chose the Scality RING as the basis for a 500-petabyte
storage environment, which would be among the largest ever.[36]

"Captive" object storage systems like Facebook's Haystack have scaled impressively. In April 2009, Haystack was
managing 60 billion photos and 1.5 petabytes of storage, adding 220 million photos and 25 terabytes a week.[24][37]
Facebook more recently stated that they were adding 350 million photos a day and were storing 240 billion photos.[38]
This could equal as much as 357 petabytes.[39]

Cloud storage has become pervasive as many new web and mobile applications choose it as a common way to store binary
data.[40] As the storage backend to many popular applications like Smugmug and Dropbox, AWS S3 has grown to massive
scale, citing over 2-trillion objects stored in April 2013.[41] Two months later, Microsoft claimed that they stored even
more objects in Azure at 8.5 trillion.[42] By April 2014, Azure claimed over 20-trillion objects stored.[43] Windows Azure
Storage manages Blobs (user files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery) and counts them all as
objects.[44]

Market analysis
IDC has begun to assess the object-based-storage market annually using its MarketScape methodology. IDC describes the
MarketScape as: "...a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that assess a vendor's current and
future success in the said market or market segment and provide a measure of their ascendancy to become a Leader or
maintain a leadership. IDC MarketScape assessments are particularly helpful in emerging markets that are often
fragmented, have several players, and lack clear leaders."[45]

In 2013, IDC rated Cleversafe, Scality, DataDirect Networks, Amplidata, and EMC as leaders.[46] In 2014, it rated Scality,
Cleversafe, DataDirect Networks, Hitachi Data Systems, Amplidata, EMC, and Cloudian[47][48][49] as leaders.[50][51][52]

Standards

Object-based storage device standards

OSD version 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 5/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

In the first version of the OSD standard,[53] objects are specified with a 64-bit partition ID and a 64-bit object ID.
Partitions are created and deleted within an OSD, and objects are created and deleted within partitions. There are no fixed
sizes associated with partitions or objects; they are allowed to grow subject to physical size limitations of the device or
logical quota constraints on a partition.

An extensible set of attributes describe objects. Some attributes are implemented directly by the OSD, such as the number
of bytes in an object and the modify time of an object. There is a special policy tag attribute that is part of the security
mechanism. Other attributes are uninterpreted by the OSD. These are set on objects by the higher-level storage systems
that use the OSD for persistent storage. For example, attributes might be used to classify objects, or to capture
relationships among different objects stored on different OSDs.

A list command returns a list of identifiers for objects within a partition, optionally filtered by matches against their
attribute values. A list command can also return selected attributes of the listed objects.

Read and write commands can be combined, or piggy-backed, with commands to get and set attributes. This ability
reduces the number of times a high-level storage system has to cross the interface to the OSD, which can improve overall
efficiency.

OSD version 2
A second generation of the SCSI command set, "Object-Based Storage Devices - 2" (OSD-2) added support for snapshots,
collections of objects, and improved error handling.[54]

A snapshot is a point in time copy of all the objects in a partition into a new partition. The OSD can implement a space-
efficient copy using copy-on-write techniques so that the two partitions share objects that are unchanged between the
snapshots, or the OSD might physically copy the data to the new partition. The standard defines clones, which are
writeable, and snapshots, which are read-only.

A collection is a special kind of object that contains the identifiers of other objects. There are operations to add and delete
from collections, and there are operations to get or set attributes for all the objects in a collection. Collections are also used
for error reporting. If an object becomes damaged by the occurrence of a media defect (i.e., a bad spot on the disk) or by a
software error within the OSD implementation, its identifier is put into a special error collection. The higher-level storage
system that uses the OSD can query this collection and take corrective action as necessary.

Differences between key-value and object stores

Unfortunately, the border between an object store and a key-value store is blurred, with key-value stores being sometimes
loosely referred to as object stores.[55]

A traditional block storage interface uses a series of fixed size blocks which are numbered starting at 0. Data must be that
exact fixed size and can be stored in a particular block which is identified by its logical block number (LBN). Later, one can
retrieve that block of data by specifying its unique LBN.

With a key-value store, data is identified by a key rather than a LBN. A key might be "cat" or "olive" or "42". It can be an
arbitrary sequence of bytes of arbitrary length. Data (called a value in this parlance) does not need to be a fixed size and
also can be an arbitrary sequence of bytes of arbitrary length. One stores data by presenting the key and data (value) to the
data store and can later retrieve the data by presenting the key. This concept is seen in programming languages. Python
calls them dictionaries, Perl calls them hashes, Java and C++ call them maps, etc. Several data stores also implement key-
value stores such as Memcached, Redis and CouchDB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 6/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

Object stores are similar to key-value stores in two respects. First, the object identifier or URL (the equivalent of the key)
can be an arbitrary string.[56] Second, data may be of an arbitrary size.

There are, however, a few key differences between key-value stores and object stores. First, object stores also allow one to
associate a limited set of attributes (metadata) with each piece of data. The combination of a key, value, and set of
attributes is referred to as an object. Second, object stores are optimized for large amounts of data (hundreds of megabytes
or even gigabytes), whereas for key-value stores the value is expected to be relatively small (kilobytes). Finally, object
stores usually offer weaker consistency guarantees such as eventual consistency, whereas key-value stores offer strong
consistency.

See also
Cloud storage
Clustered file system
Object access method

References
1. Mesnier, Mike; Gregory R. Ganger; Erik Riedel (August 2003). "Object-Based Storage" (http://www.storagevisions.co
m/White%20Papers/MesnierIEEE03.pdf) (PDF). IEEE Communications Magazine: 84–90.
doi:10.1109/mcom.2003.1222722 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2Fmcom.2003.1222722). Retrieved 27 October 2013.
2. Porter De Leon, Yadin; Tony Piscopo. "Object Storage versus Block Storage: Understanding the Technology
Differences" (http://www.druva.com/blog/object-storage-versus-block-storage-understanding-technology-differences/).
Druva.com. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
3. Chandrasekaran, Arun, Dayley, Alan (11 February 2014). "Critical Capabilities for Object Storage" (http://www.gartner.
com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1R78PJ9&ct=140226&st=sb). Gartner Research.
4. Garth A. Gibson; Nagle D.; Amiri K.; Chan F.; Feinberg E.; Gobioff H.; Lee C.; Ozceri B.; Riedel E.; Rochberg D.;
Zelenka J. "File Server Scaling with Network-Attached Secure Disks" (http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/ftp/NASD/Sigmetrics9
7.pdf) (PDF). Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
(Sigmetrics ‘97). Retrieved 27 October 2013.
5. Factor, Michael; Meth, K.; Naor, D.; Rodeh, O.; Satran, J. "Object Storage: The Future Building Block for Storage
Systems" (http://webhdd.ru/library/files/PositionOSD.pdf) (PDF). IBM Haifa Research Labs. Retrieved 26 September
2013.
6. Gobioff, Howard; Gibson, Garth A.; Tygar, Doug (1 October 1997). "Security for Network Attached Storage Devices
(CMU-CS-97-185)" (http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1147&context=pdl). Parallel Data
Laboratory. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
7. Sanjay Ghemawat; Howard Gobioff; Shun-Tak Leung (October 2003). "The Google File System" (http://research.goog
le.com/archive/gfs-sosp2003.pdf) (PDF). Google. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
8. Braam, Peter. "Lustre: The intergalactic file system" (http://ols.fedoraproject.org/OLS/Reprints-2002/braam-reprint.pd
f) (PDF). Retrieved 17 September 2013.
9. "OceanStore" (http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/). Retrieved 18 September 2013.
10. Kubiatowicz, John; Bindel, D.; Chen, Y.; Czerwinski, S.; Eaton, P.; Geels, D.; Gummadi, R.; Rhea, S.; Weatherspoon,
H.; Weimer, W.; Wells, C.; Zhao, B. (November 2000). "OceanStore: An Architecture for Global-Scale Persistent
Storage" (http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/publications/papers/pdf/asplos00.pdf) (PDF). Proceedings of the Ninth
international Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS
2000). Retrieved 18 September 2013.
11. "EMC Unveils Low-Cost Data-Storage Product" (http://articles.latimes.com/2002/apr/30/business/fi-techbriefs30.3).
Los Angeles Times. April 30, 2002. Retrieved February 11, 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 7/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

12. Chris Mellor (December 15, 2008). "Centera Belgian development centre to close: Centera itself not threatened,
though" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/15/emc_closes_belgian_centera_dev_centre/). The Register.
Retrieved February 11, 2017.
13. Leung, Leo (16 September 2013). "After 10 years, object storage investment continues and begins to bear significant
fruit" (http://blog.oxygencloud.com/2013/09/16/after-10-years-object-storage-investment-continues-and-begins-to-bea
r-significant-fruit/). Retrieved 17 September 2013.
14. Mellor, Chris (Dec. 2, 2015). "Openio's objective is opening up object storage space" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/20
15/12/02/openio_object_storage_upstart/).
15. Nicolas, Philippe (Oct. 2, 2015). "OpenIO, ready to take off" (http://filestorage.blogspot.fr/2015/10/openio-ready-to-tak
e-off.html/).
16. Raffo, Dave (May 20, 2016). "OpenIO joins object storage cloud scrum" (http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/ne
ws/450296765/OpenIO-joins-object-storage-cloud-scrum/).
17. Maleval, Jean-Jacques (Apr. 25, 2016). "Start-Up Profile: OpenIO" (http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/start-
ups/start-up-profile-openio/).
18. Nicolas, Philippe (July 15, 2016). "The History Boys: Object storage ... from the beginning" (https://www.theregister.c
o.uk/2016/07/15/the_history_boys_cas_and_object_storage_map/).
19. "What is Object Storage and How Will It Help Me Find My Car?" (http://www.scality.com/blog/object-storage-will-help-f
ind-car/).
20. Riedel, Erik; Sami Iren (February 2007). "Object Storage and Applications" (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lsf0
7/tech/riedel.pdf) (PDF). Retrieved 3 November 2013.
21. "The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Vision" (http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/kinetic-vision-how-seagate-new-de
veloper-tools-meets-the-needs-of-cloud-storage-platforms-master-ti/). Seagate. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
22. Gallagher, Sean (27 October 2013). "Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet" (https://arstechnica.com/info
rmation-technology/2013/10/seagate-introduces-a-new-drive-interface-ethernet/). Arstechnica.com. Retrieved
3 November 2013.
23. Corbet, Jonathan (4 November 2008). "Linux and object storage devices" (https://lwn.net/Articles/305740/). LWN.net.
Retrieved 8 November 2013.
24. Vajgel, Peter. "Needle in a haystack: efficient storage of billions of photos" (https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_
id=76191543919). Retrieved 17 September 2013.
25. Primesberger, Chris (27 October 2016). "Cloudian Raises $41 Million VC for Hybrid Cloud Object Storage" (http://ww
w.eweek.com/storage/cloudian-raises-41-million-vc-for-hybrid-cloud-object-storage.html).
26. "IBM Knowledge Center" (https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXKQY_4.2.2/com.ibm.spectrum.scale.v4r
22.doc/bl1adm_manageunifiedaccess.htm). www.ibm.com. Retrieved 2017-03-01.
27. Mellor, Chris (Sept. 23, 2014). "NetApp 'Amazon-izes' StorageGRID" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/23/netap
p_amazonises_storagegrid/).
28. Nicolas, Philippe (Sept. 21, 2009). "Caringo FileFly, back to the future" (http://continuousdataprotection.blogspot.fr/20
15/09/caringo-filefly-back-to-future.html).
29. Coughlin, Tom. "S3 Without Amazon And Intelligent Scale-Out NAS" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/
02/14/s3-without-amazon-and-intelligent-scale-out-nas/#14722d124f38). Forbes. Retrieved 2017-05-14.
30. Dilger, Andreas. "Lustre Future Development" (http://storageconference.org/2012/Presentations/M04.Dilger.pdf)
(PDF). IEEE MSST. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
31. "Datadirect Networks to build world's fastest storage system for Titan, the world's most powerful supercomputer" (htt
p://www.multivu.com/mnr/60497-datadirect-networks-titan-supercomputer-storage-system-ornl). Retrieved 27 October
2013.
32. "EMC Marks Five Years of EMC Centera Innovation and Market Leadership" (http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/
us/2007/04182007-5028.htm). EMC. 18 April 2007. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
33. "Hitachi Content Platform Supports Multiple Petabytes, Billions of Objects" (http://www.techvalidate.com/portals/hitach
i-content-platform-customers-with-more-than-1pb-of-data-stored). Techvalidate.com. Retrieved 19 September 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 8/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

34. Robb, Drew (11 May 2011). "EMC World Continues Focus on Big Data, Cloud and Flash" (http://www.infostor.com/ba
ckup-and_recovery/cloud-storage/emc-world-continues-focus-on-big-data-cloud-and-flash-.html). Infostor. Retrieved
19 September 2013.
35. Hamilton, George. "In it for the Long Run: EMC's Object Storage Leadership" (http://www.rethinkstorage.com/in-it-for-t
he-long-run-emcs-object-storage-leadership#.UyEzj9yllFI). Retrieved 15 March 2014.
36. Mellor, Chris (1 July 2014). "Los Alamos National Laboratory likes it, puts Scality's RING on it" (https://www.theregiste
r.co.uk/2014/07/01/scalitys_ring_goes_faster/). The Register. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
37. Nicolas, Philippe (Sept. 13, 2009). "Haystack chez Facebook" (http://filestorage.blogspot.com/2009/09/haystack-chez
-facebook.html).
38. Miller, Rich (13 January 2013). "Facebook Builds Exabyte Data Centers for Cold Storage" (http://www.datacenterkno
wledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/facebook-builds-new-data-centers-for-cold-storage/). Datacenterknowledge.com.
Retrieved 6 November 2013.
39. Leung, Leo (17 May 2014). "How much data does x store?" (http://techexpectations.org/2014/05/17/how-much-data-d
oes-x-store/). Techexpectations.org. Retrieved 23 May 2014.
40. Leung, Leo (January 11, 2012). "Object storage already dominates our days (we just didn't notice)" (http://blog.oxygen
cloud.com/2012/01/11/object-storage-already-dominates/). Retrieved 27 October 2013.
41. Harris, Derrick (18 April 2013). "Amazon S3 goes exponential, now stores 2 trillion objects" (http://gigaom.com/2013/0
4/18/amazon-s3-goes-exponential-now-stores-2-trillion-objects/). Gigaom. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
42. Wilhelm, Alex (27 June 2013). "Microsoft: Azure powers 299M Skype users, 50M Office Web Apps users, stores 8.5T
objects" (http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/06/27/microsoft-our-cloud-powers-hundreds-of-millions/).
thenextweb.com. Retrieved 18 September 2013.
43. Nelson, Fritz (4 April 2014). "Microsoft Azure's 44 New Enhancements, 20 Trillion Objects" (http://www.tomsitpro.com/
articles/microsoft-azure-paas-iaas-cloud-computing,1-1841.html). Tom's IT Pro. Retrieved 3 September 2014.
44. Calder, Brad. "Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency" (http://sig
ops.org/sosp/sosp11/current/2011-Cascais/printable/11-calder.pdf) (PDF). 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating
Systems Principles (SOSP): Microsoft. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
45. Nadkarni, Ashish. "IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2013 Vendor Assessment" (http://www.idc.co
m/getdoc.jsp?containerId=244081). idc.com. IDC. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
46. Mellor, Chris (27 November 2013). "IDC's explicit snapshot: Everyone who's anyone in object storage: In 3D" (https://
www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/idcs_objectscape_pretty_as_a_picture/). The Register. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
47. Nicolas, Philippe (Sept. 14, 2015). "Cloudian shakes the object storage market" (http://filestorage.blogspot.fr/2015/09/
cloudian-shakes-object-storage-market.html).
48. Mellor, Chris (June. 21, 2016). "Cloudian clobbers car drivers with targeted ads" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/0
6/21/cloudian_could_clobber_car_drives_with_targeted_ads/).
49. Nicolas, Philippe (June. 22, 2016). "Cloudian is the real S3 leader" (http://filestorage.blogspot.fr/2016/06/cloudian-is-r
eal-s3-leader.html).
50. Mellor, Chris (6 January 2015). "IDC: Who's HOT and who's NOT (in object storage) in 2014" (https://www.theregister.
co.uk/2015/01/06/idc_shows_emcs_object_presence_shrinking/). The Register. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
51. Mellor, Chris (Nov. 24, 2015). "We pick storage brains: Has object storage endgame started?" (http://www.channelregi
ster.co.uk/2015/11/24/object_storage_endgame/).
52. Nicolas, Philippe (Oct. 19, 2015). "Red alert for Object Storage vendors" (http://filestorage.blogspot.com/2015/10/red-
alert-for-object-storage-vendors.html).
53. "INCITS 400-2004" (http://www.techstreet.com/cgi-bin/detail?product_id=1204555). InterNational Committee for
Information Technology Standards. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
54. "INCITS 458-2011" (http://www.techstreet.com/products/1801667). InterNational Committee for Information
Technology Standards. 15 March 2011. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
55. http://blog.gigaspaces.com/were-flash-keyvalue-and-object-stores-made-for-each-other-guest-post-by-johann-george-
sandisk/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 9/10
3/4/2018 Object storage - Wikipedia

56. OpentStack Foundation. "Object Storage API overview" (https://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/api/object_api_v1

_overview.html). OpenStack Documentation. Retrieved 9 June 2017.

External links
AWS S3 API Documentation (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Welcome.html)
Google Cloud Storage API Documentation (https://developers.google.com/storage/)
IBM Cloud Object Storage (http://ibm.biz/bluemix_COS)
Openstack Swift API Documentation (http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/)
Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Documentation (https://developers.seagate.com/display/KV/Kinetic+Open+Storage+D
ocumentation+Wiki)
Windows Azure Storage API Documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179355.aspx)
Minio Cloud Storage Documentation (https://docs.minio.io/)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Object_storage&oldid=816324468"

This page was last edited on 20 December 2017, at 17:06.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this
site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage 10/10