Five Must Haves to Look for When Evaluating Object Storage

Here’s an article published by Caringo Inc.:

Object storage has emerged as the
choice to handle the amounts of unstructured data managed by some of
the public cloud services from Amazon, Google and Facebook.

IT Administrators are now realizing
that they too can leverage these benefits to simplify their storage
infrastructure for private clouds, active archives and storage
tiering, while increasing protection and reducing costs. However, not
all object storage solutions are created equal. Here are a few tips
to consider before you invest in an object storage platform:

1. Symmetric Architecture.

the Southwest Airlines Approach

Have you ever noticed that all
Southwest planes are the same? They do this to reduce
costs, simplify operations and reduce delays and increase profits.
Well the same goes for object storage solutions. You need to look for
a solution with symmetric architecture where all nodes do the same
thing and there are no ‘specialty nodes.’ For example any
node can find an object, can protect data, and all nodes
participate in the repair of any issue encountered. Clusters built on
symmetric nodes can be replaced or expanded without downtime.

2. Data protection for any size
file,
any number of files and any capacity

Make sure that the object storage
solution can protect your information based on the business value of
the content regardless of file size, file count or capacity. It’s
important to understand that even applications for storing large
files also require small file sets. When protecting small
files (KBs in size) or small capacities (10s of TBs), protection
schemes where file copies are made and stored independently
(replication) are efficient because other methods come with
error correction or address overhead that leads to unneeded capacity
utilization and increased recovery times. As storage capacities and
file sizes grow, splitting a file into segments with parity
information and storing those segments on separate nodes (erasure
coding) is more efficient due to hardware and resource utilization.
An object storage solution should employ replication and
erasure coding in the same cluster to ensure the most efficient use
of resources, footprint, protection and recovery. The solution should
also allow the protection scheme to be set per object and enforced
automatically to simplify management as capacity and file count
grows.

3. Instant access, platform
neutrality,
NO proprietary databases

The popularity of mobile devices
and tablets is driving the need for IT organizations to support
instant access of information. Traditionally you only had to think
about providing access to information on a shared drive behind the
firewall, the intranet or on a wiki, but the popularity of
cloud-based services gives employees an access to corporate
information in an often unsanctioned and insecure fashion. Different
technology platforms are being integrated and it falls upon IT to
ensure interoperability of these platforms. Object storage can be
used to ensure instant accessibility and platform neutrality;
however, you need to ensure that the solution you choose uses
standards like HTTP and stores metadata with the content. This
approach makes information portable because all descriptive,
management, security and operational information needed to ensure
interoperability with any platform is accessible and not locked in a
proprietary database.

4. Cloud storage enablement

Object storage solutions do a good
job of taking networking and server resources and providing a unified
pool of storage but you need to make sure that the solution is easy
to expand and supports secure multi-tenancy in an easy to access and
integrated fashion. The solution should allow you to plug-in
additional servers to expand without downtime, without manual storage
balancing and without the need to modify existing hardware in any way
(such as expanding RAM to increase indexing). The solution should
also support secure multi-tenancy, authorization and access via
standards like LDAP, AD and ACLs. The solution should offer
programmatic and web based access for integration into any
application, device or process or for direct use and management by
administrators and end users.

5. Entire stack provided by one
company
the Apple approach

Have you ever wondered why Apple
has been so successful? Sure they have great industrial design but
they have always had that. The truth is that their stuff works and
this is driven by their control over their entire technology
stack. You should look for the same in an object storage solution.
Ensure that the core infrastructure software is provided by one
organization. This ensures operability and optimization throughout
the entire stack and ultimately results in reduced complexity,
reduced costs and improved quality of storage service for you and you
organization.

The growth of data, need for
ubiquitous accessibility, and market acceptance of cloud storage are
all accelerating the adoption of object storage. Looking for these 5 ‘must haves’ will simplify evaluation and help make the right decision for organization.