Source of the article: https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Nine-reasons-object-level-storage-adoption-has-increased
Object-level storage is seeing higher levels of adoption than ever before. From compliance requirements to scalability issues and budget constraints, object storage has proven to be an effective alternative to traditional file storage. Here are nine reasons why more organizations are turning to object storage technology.
Reason 1: Growth of unstructured data
According to IDC, unstructured data has a compound annual growth rate of approximately 62%. The granular approach of object-oriented storage makes it a valuable resource for dealing with large amounts of unstructured data.
Reason 2: Scalability
Object storage can scale into the dozens to hundreds of exabytes of usable capacity, and there is no technical reason why object-level storage cannot scale into zettabytes or even yottabytes. It leverages the highest density storage, whether it’s hard disk drives, solid-state drives or both.
Reason 3: No migration required
Object-based storage is a shared nothing scale-out system, so it does not require a technology refresh in the traditional sense. When hardware needs to be refreshed, it is simply a matter of adding the new object storage nodes to the system typically connected with standard Ethernet networks. This is followed by removing the old nodes, one at a time, from the system. No data has to be migrated. Erasure coding or multicopy mirroring, in addition to self-healing algorithms, recreates the data required on the new nodes. As capacity increases, data is automatically leveled across all object storage nodes.
Reason 4: Compatibility with Hadoop and NoSQL
Object-level storage is often a good storage option for Hadoop or NoSQL, depending on the vendor. Some vendors, such as Caringo and Cloudian, even have analytics capabilities built into the object storage itself.
Reason 5: Replaces traditional file storage
Another reason object storage adoption has accelerated is that it is perceived as the next generation of file storage. Most object storage systems available today have NFS, SMB and iSCSI interfaces built into the system. Geographic distribution capabilities and analytics make object storage very useful and valuable as file storage.
Reason 6: More efficient than tape, but still low cost
Next to tape, object storage is the most cost-effective form of data storage. But while tape is too slow for most analytics, active archiving or fast restores from backup, object storage is more than fast enough. Unlike tape, object storage is also very good at sharing unstructured data between geographically dispersed personnel, working with Hadoop infrastructures and keeping the data whole beyond 30 years. Tape and object storage can both implement write once, read many technology, but only object storage can limit access to an object or file.
Reason 7: Improvements to immediate consistency
One of the drawbacks of object-level storage was that it was eventually consistent, which could lead to errors since data was updated concurrently in two different nodes or locations. However, several object storage providers — Caringo, Cloudian, HGST and Samsung-Joyent, for example — now offer immediate consistency with object storage technology.
Reason 8: Faster performance with flash SSDs
Object storage was also susceptible to high latency and slower response times. Strategic implementation of much faster, relatively low cost, dense high-capacity flash SSDs based on consumer multilevel cell and 3D triple level cell has been eliminating that weakness.
Reason 9: Standardization
Perhaps the most prominent reason for the acceleration in the growth of object-level storage adoption is the rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service. Amazon S3 is AWS’ object storage, and the S3 application programming interface has become the de facto standard object storage API. All object storage providers — even open source variations of OpenStack Swift and Ceph — have adopted the S3 API at some level to make themselves compatible with applications that already use it. This has made the plethora of applications written for AWS S3 compatible with private object storage implementations.