Object Storage
An object storage manages big data as objects whereby an object includes data, metadata and a unique identifier. The object storage architecture enables easy management of data replication or data distribution. Therefore it enables a highly fault tolerant system design. It is thus a perfect technology for storing photos on Facebook or retrieving songs on Spotify. Often this technology is used for storing unstructured big data that significantly grows on a daily basis. Data in an object storage is also often replicated across geographic regions where it can be accessed locally by staff from organizations in different cities.
An object storage manages data not like file and folder hierarchies and is different than block storage. Instead it can be seen as an object-based storage that refers to the way in which a user organizes and works with units of storage that are called simply objects. An interesting comparison between both can be found here. One concrete example of a powerful, simple, and cost effective object storage service is the Cloud Storage of the Google Cloud Platform. It offers storage on the Infrastructure-As-A-Service level and is part of the storage and database area of the Google Cloud Platform.
Another concrete object storage system is the OpenStack Swift service. It stores and retrieves arbitrary unstructured data objects via various APIs such as REST and HTTP. It is a powerful & robust storage service with high durability and high availability that enables concurrency across the entire data sets by design. OpenStack Swift is an object storage that is a cost effective storage with properties to scale-out. It includes features such as high fault tolerance since its architecture includes data replication. More details can be found in our article .
Object storage details
The following video provides more pieces of information about the topic:
