Object Drives: A New Architectural Partitioning

A number of scale out storage solutions, as part of open source and other projects, are architected to scale out by incrementally adding and removing storage nodes. Example projects include:

• Hadoop’s HDFS
• CEPH
• Swift (OpenStack object storage)

The typical storage node architecture includes inexpensive enclosures with IP networking, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time. Power and space requirements of Data Centers are difficult to meet with this type of solution. Object Drives further partition these object systems allowing storage to scale up and down by single drive increments.

This talk will discuss the current state and future prospects for object drives. Use cases and requirements will be examined and best practices will be described.

Learning Objectives:

• What are object drives?
• What value do they provide?
• Where are they best deployed?

Mark A. Carlson has more than 35 years of experience with networking and storage development and more than 18 years experience with Java technology. Mark was one of the authors of the CDMI Cloud Storage standard. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is the co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage and Object Drive technical working groups, and serves as vice chair on the SNIA Technical Council.