Timeline for Object Storage

Published almost 5 years ago in The Register under the title The History Boys: Object storage … from the beginning, the original idea of this article was to provide and share publicly a timeline of the domain that didn’t exist anywhere. It represents an effort to provide an independent market view as we heard so bizarre stuff from various origins.

Below you can find with all updated recent developments from open source, companies, M&As… and of course some distributed storage and content addressable storage. Of course distributed storage related to block and file are not considered here.

Click to enlarge

You can easily find various waves, periods and trends in this timeline:

• the red bubble is very present meaning that the number of M&As is significant,
• several open source projects,
• a few cease of operations,
• not a lot of OEMs and very few reseller agreement probably due to the first remark above,
• a first period around 1998 to 2005 with CAS players and even before as we need to include FilePool,
• a second one from 2004-2005 to 2009 with object storage pioneers and the appearance of 2 famous open source projects, Amazon S3 appeared in March 2006,
• a third period from 2008-2009 to 2016 with a maturity period, and
• since 2015-2016 seeing an active M&As, cease of operations and confirmation of strong players plus the new infrastructure requirement around container and Kubernetes-based environment being a new axis of development for object storage.