When Object Storage Meets High-Performance

Organizations are struggling to manage the large amounts of data they’re collecting. To answer the need, they’re turning to high-performance object storage.

What is High-Performance Storage?

High-performance storage provides fast and reliable access to data. It is typically used when speed and performance are critical, like in high-performance computing environments and data analytics.

Types of high-performance storage systems include:

• All-flash arrays: use solid-state drives (SSDs) exclusively, providing fast access times and high input/output operations per minute (IOPS).
• Hybrid arrays: use a combination of SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs) to balance performance and capacity.
• Object storage: designed to handle large amounts of unstructured data, such as images, videos, and other media files. They are scalable and can handle petabytes of data.

For scalability and cost-effectiveness, object storage has become a popular method of delivering high-performance storage.

What is Object Storage?

The explosion of data in modern organizations, like photos, videos, emails, web pages, sensor data, and audio files, requires a scalable solution to distribute and access data.

Object storage stores data as objects instead of a traditional file hierarchy. Each piece of data is stored as a standalone object with its metadata attributes and a unique identifier that can be accessed through an API.

Object storage systems store data across multiple physical devices, making it easy for users to access the content they need. This architecture makes data more available and allows it to be quickly retrieved when needed.

Because object storage replaces hierarchical file systems with a flat structure, it allows users to aggregate storage into nodes and pools that can scale infinitely.

Object Storage and High-Performance Storage (HPS)

Traditionally, object storage was thought of as a way to store massive amounts of data with little need for quick access.

However, object storage technology advancements have led to better performance, and IT architects and suppliers have learned to utilize object storage's advantages more efficiently.

Commonly used for large volumes of unstructured data, it is now used for big data and analytics, online content delivery, and high-throughput demands.

As the number of applications that can work with object storage increases, businesses now want to use it for more demanding applications.

How Would High-Performance Object Storage Work?

To optimize object storage performance, IT teams first need to start measuring performance.

Once the performance is baselined, improvements include replacing low-cost spinning disks with faster NVMe flash SSDs, erasure encoding offloaded to hardware, and software system improvements.

Other improvements involve optimizing API calls, adding disks to spread out the input/output (I/O) workload, moving some processing into hardware, and using more lightweight hashes for ingest.

Additionally, high-performance object storage systems may use hardware acceleration, such as Reed-Solomon erasure encoding built into some CPUs, to improve performance.

Who Needs To Shift to High-Performance Object Storage?

Many organizations could benefit from leveraging high-performance object storage:

• Healthcare organizations can use high-performance object storage to store and manage large medical images like X-rays and MRIs. Healthcare professionals can quickly access and analyze patient imaging data to make informed diagnoses and treatment plans.
• Financial services firms need fast access times and high availability of high-performance object storage, which allows traders to make informed decisions.
• Manufacturing companies can leverage high-performance object storage to store and manage sensor data from production lines and equipment, identifying potential issues or areas for improvement.
• E-commerce businesses can use high-performance object storage to store multimedia content, such as product images and videos.
• Educational institutions and research organizations keep massive amounts of data. With high-performance object storage, researchers and students can easily access and analyze this data.

The Players

Many companies offer high-performance object storage as onsite or offsite solutions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) - AWS offers Amazon S3, a scalable, durable, and secure object storage service.

Microsoft Azure - Azure offers Azure Blob Storage, a scalable object storage solution for unstructured data.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - GCP offers Cloud Storage, a unified object storage for developers and enterprises.

Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) - ECS is a software-defined object storage platform that can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.

OVHCloud Object Storage

To answer the growing demand for the ability to store and process vast amounts of data, OVHCloud extended its data storage solutions to include high-performance options.

With OVHcloud, you can upload your static files to an unlimited space and make them accessible through a web-based API. As your data grows, you don’t have to worry about scaling because our high-performance object storage optimizes data processing at every stage of the data lifecycle (storage, transfer, intensive use, and deletion).

Conclusion

With the exploding proliferation of data, organizations need scalable ways to not only store large amounts of unstructured data but also quickly access it. High-performance object storage provides that capability. For more information on object storage, contact a solutions architect at us.ovhcloud.com.