Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information in Classic, Virtualized, and Cloud Environments, Second Edition

Chapter 8

Object-Based and Unified Storage

Key Concepts

Object-Based Storage

Content Addressed Storage

Unified Storage

Recent studies have shown that more than 90 percent of data generated is unstructured. This growth of unstructured data has posed new challenges to IT administrators and storage managers. With this growth, traditional NAS, which is a dominant solution for storing unstructured data, has become inefficient. Data growth adds high overhead to the network-attached storage (NAS) in terms of managing a large number of permissions and nested directories. In an enterprise environment, NAS also manages large amounts of metadata generated by hosts, storage systems, and individual applications. Typically this metadata is stored as part of the file and distributed throughout the environment. This adds to the complexity and latency in searching and retrieving files. These challenges demand a smarter approach to manage unstructured data based on its content rather than metadata about its name, location, and so on. Object-based storage is a way to store file data in the form of objects based on its content and other attributes rather than the name and location.

Due to varied application requirements, organizations have been deploying storage area networks (SANs), NAS, and object-based storage devices (OSDs) in their data centers. Deploying these disparate storage solutions adds management complexity, cost and environmental overhead. An ideal solution would be to have an integrated ...