Cloud object storage is a decentralized approach to
storing digital information in a cloud service provider's data centers. Object
storage systems can access any piece of data without needing to know on which
physical storage device, file system or directory it resides.
Instead of a file path, the
object storage software design includes a globally unique identifier for each
object along with rich, customizable metadata. The metadata is separated to
enable other capabilities such as application- and user-specific data for indexing,
interfaces that can be directly programmed by the application, a global
namespace and more flexible data management policies. This means that objects
can be stored across multiple data centers located in different parts of the
world and accessed directly through application program interfaces (APIs),
HTTP and HTTPS.
Object storage's main advantage
is that it makes data more resilient to disaster or hardware failures because
it is highly distributed -- so it is still available even if several nodes
fail. It's also a lot cheaper compared to traditional storage because object
storage is stored on commodity hardware or virtual machines (VMs) that are
infinitely scalable. Objects are stored in a flat address space, which
eliminates complexity and scalability challenges. Data protection is built into
the architecture, which can be in the form of either replication technology or
erasure coding.
Cloud object storage vendors
include Amazon Simple Storage Service, Caringo Swarm, Cloudian HyperStore, Dell
EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Scalable Object Storage
based on the Scality Ring software-defined storage platform, Hitachi Vantara's
Hitachi Content Platform, IBM Cloud Object Storage and the OpenStack Swift open
source object storage system.
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