Object-based storage :

      Object-based storage is hardly new. EMC pushed it into the forefront in 2002 with its Centera line in an attempt to stake out a new market known as content-addressable storage (CAS). But performance issues generally relegated the use of CAS products to archives of information that rarely if ever changed, such as medical images.

               A new wave of object storage makes use of such protocols as Representational State Transfer (REST), and is gaining a second look for near-line and primary data storage -- especially in the cloud.

         “There’s no technical barrier that says you can’t use object [storage] for primary storage,” said Andrew Reichman, a principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. “Some primary storage is not that performance sensitive, especially with files.”

        EMC now promotes Atmos for that purpose. Other object offerings include Caringo Inc.’s CAStor, DataDirect Networks Web Object Scaler (WOS), Dell’s DX Object Storage (which uses Caringo’s technology), NetApp’s (formerly Bycast) StorageGrid, and products from startups such as Amplidata, Cleversafe Inc., Mezeo Software and Scality.

       “In the long run, we could see object [as] a replacement for file storage -- just a better way to do file storage,” Reichman said.

         Object storage is attractive to cloud storage providers because of its massive scalability and shared tenancy features, especially in comparison to ordinary file- or block-based storage.

       “You have so much metadata for each chunk of data, you can lock it down more easily and move it around based on policies and change the redundancy based on policies,” Reichman said, explaining the draw for cloud providers.