What is Object Storage & How Does it Work?

The unprecedented amounts of digital content being generated today demands that businesses and organizations find more efficient ways to store, manage and access data. More than 50% of organizations were managing 5PB or more of data in 2022, compared with less than 40% in 2021, according to a survey by data management provider Komprise. Traditional storage methods may not be able to cope up with this ever-increasing need for storage or they may have limitations on scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. This is where object storage becomes invaluable.

What is Object Storage?

Object storage is a method of storing and managing data as discrete units called objects. It is a data storage architecture that is capable of handling large amounts of unstructured data.  In contrast to traditional storage approaches that organize data into hierarchical structures such as directories and folders, object storage treats data as individual objects with unique identifiers.

How Does Object Storage Work?

Object Storage works by keeping the data blocks of a file together as an object, along with its relevant metadata and a custom identifier. These are placed in a flat data environment known as a storage pool. These storage pools allow you to locate the exact data you need quickly and easily, while the flat environment makes it possible for you to scale quickly when large storage needs are required.

At the time of accessing the data,  object storage systems will use the unique identifier and the metadata to find the object required. This can be an image or audio file or any other form of unstructured data.  The objects are located and accessed using RESTful APIs, HTTP, and HTTPS for querying the metadata. The distributed architecture of object storage allows for parallel retrieval, resulting in faster data access.

Benefits of Object Storage

The nature of the storage architecture means that Object Storage systems provide numerous benefits such as the following.

Scalability

Unlike traditional storage systems, object storage can scale horizontally by adding more nodes to the system. This scalability enables organizations to handle the ever-increasing volumes of data without experiencing performance degradation or storage capacity constraints.

Cost-effectiveness

Using Object storage, you can reduce costs by only paying for the capacity you need.  This means you can even start small if you are in the early stages of growth and scale as your business expands. This also has the added benefit of reducing waste, including those from extra headcount, unused space and other resources.

High Availability

Object storage systems are designed to provide high availability, ensuring that data is accessible even in the event of hardware failures or network outages. By distributing data across multiple storage nodes, object storage can replicate objects and maintain multiple copies, minimizing the risk of data loss. The Object Storage offering from CDNetworks for example, ensures high availability thanks to the 99.999999999% data durability.

Fault Tolerance & Durability

By using data replication or erasure coding techniques, object storage can protect data against hardware failures, corruption, or data loss. Data replication helps create multiple copies of objects across different nodes, while erasure coding divides data into fragments, allowing reconstruction even if some fragments are lost or damaged.

Ease of Integration

Object storage systems allow for easy integration with various applications and workflows. They provide standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which allows for integration with cloud-based services, content delivery networks (CDNs), and other data management tools. For example, Object Storage from CDNetworks uses RESTful API to integrate with the application layer to effectively help manage data and automate Object Storage tasks.

Object Storage vs Block Storage vs File Storage

When considering storage solutions, it’s also worth considering block storage and file storage, and to understand the difference between each. Each of these storage types has its own unique characteristics and use cases.

Block Storage

Block storage is the most fundamental type of storage, where data is organized into fixed-sized blocks and accessed using block-level protocols. It provides low-level access to storage and is preferred for applications that require direct and fast storage access.

File Storage

File storage, on the other hand, organizes data into hierarchical structures with directories and files, similar to a local hard drive. It uses file-level protocols like NTFS (New Technology File System) or Network File System (NFS) in the case of Linux.

How Do They Differ?

The first and most fundamental difference between the three storage types is the way in which they organize data. Object storage organizes data into objects, each with a unique identifier, whereas block storage divides data into fixed-sized blocks, and file storage organizes data into directories and files.

Another important difference is in the way in which metadata is stored. Object storage stores metadata alongside each object, while block and file storage typically have limited metadata capabilities.

What are the use cases for object storage?

Object storage is a versatile storage solution with a wide range of use cases such as the following:

Cloud-Based Storage Solutions

Object storage is a fundamental component of cloud-based storage solutions. The scalability, availability and cost-effectiveness of object storage lends itself well to cloud storage providers who can use it to provide services to their customers.

Cloud-Native Application Data

Modern cloud-native applications often generate and consume massive amounts of unstructured data, such as logs, user-generated content, and sensor data. For these cases, object storage is an ideal choice as cloud-native applications can directly integrate through APIs.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup and disaster recovery solutions rely on reliable and resilient storage architectures. That makes object storage a good option, as it helps store backup copies as objects with multiple replicas, protecting data against hardware failures, human errors, and natural disasters.

Content Distribution and Streaming

Content delivery networks (CDNs) can leverage object storage to cache and distribute content to end-users, reducing latency and improving performance. Object storage also helps in handling large file sizes and support streaming protocols, making it well-suited for video-on-demand platforms, live streaming services, and digital media archives.

Archiving and Compliance

Object storage’s durability and fault tolerance make it an excellent choice for archiving purposes. Organizations can securely store large volumes of archival data in object storage, ensuring its integrity and accessibility over extended periods.  And when there is a need to retrieve data for compliance audits and legal discovery processes, object storage makes this easy thanks to the application of metadata and tagging to objects.

Object Storage Solution from CDNetworks

CDNetworks provides business with Object Storage, a high-performance, always-on data repository that allows you to store unstructured data and access it from any location using the HTTP or HTTPS protocol. With this solution, you get to enjoy dynamic scalability without needing to partition your data. It also allows for cross-region replication, meaning you can transfer files between buckets in different regions. It also supports strong Amazon S3 compatibility to access data easily from any application, gateway, or third-party solution.

Try CDNetworks CDN and Object Storage FREE for 6 Months

Want to get the best of both worlds – a state-of-the-art CDN as well as an Object Storage solution? Join CDNetworks today and you can enjoy 6 months of free CDN service with 100TB monthly traffic, along with 20TB of free Object Storage. You will not need to worry about migrating your data to our platform either as we will handle that for you. Try out this offer here today.