Moving toward object storage devices

Indeed, this not much rumored public display of object storage technology could mark the beginning of a significant leap forward for this industry.

At the booth I had the pleasure of meeting Erik Riedel from Seagate Research, who gave me a captivating update on object storage.

Riedel chairs with IBM's Julian Satran the Object-Based Storage Devices Technical Workgroup at SNIA, and has a privileged view of the state of this technology.

The concept behind object storage is rather simple: to give storage devices more control over basic features such as allocating sectors for a file. Obviously, in an object world the OS does not manage those activities anymore, which translates into increased transparency of a device data content across different OSes.

Although the smaller unit of data for disk drives is still (obviously) the sector, the minimum exchange unit between OS and object devices becomes, you guess it, an object.

For example, to store this article the operating system would pass the whole content as an object to the storage device, receiving in return an object ID to associate with its filename.

To retrieve the same article, the OS would find its filename in a directory, pass the associated ID along with a request to retrieve an object to the device, and grab the results.

If you are thinking that to accommodate object storage devices the set of SCSI commands needs to be expanded, you're absolutely right. But the impact of object storage could go much further.

Think of how many other activities besides space allocation an intelligent object device could manage independently from the OS. Consider for example, access control, encryption, replication, criteria-based data movement across devices .. the possibilities are nearly endless.

Perhaps the most immediate impact of object storage will be to finally settle the dispute between serving block and serving files. Of course, the winner will be serving files, or to be more accurate, serving objects.

Other possible implementations of the technology will probably be decided, as usual, by criteria of efficiency and cost. Regardless, object storage promises to be the greatest revolution since networked storage.

Hitachi takes the center stage with perpendicular recording

Perhaps saying that the same technology will make possible squeezing 1TB in a single 3.5" drives is more meaningful . (And we thought that a 500 GB drive was big).

The only comparable capacity that comes to mind is the Sony S-AIT tape drive, able to store 1 TB of data on a single cartridge, but using compression, which is not quite the same.

It's obviously big news, also because disbands some rumors that disk capacity was getting to a dead end.

If you want to learn more about perpendicular recording watch this humorous and informative cartoon from Hitachi.

Please, hold the hype...

Hi Mario,

AMEN to your comments about ILM actually not being mentioned. It's nice
to read a review about a product that actually does something simple,
measureable, and useful, instead a bunch of vague snake-oil buzzwords.

Well, thank you, Tom for that note. I'll do my best to keep the level of static down but can't make any promise. Nevertheless, please keep that feedback coming, good or bad.