Chapter 10. Object Storage

Object Storage is a robust, highly scalable and fault tolerant storage platform for unstructured data such as objects. Objects are stored bits, accessed through a RESTful, HTTP-based interface. You cannot access data at the block or file level. Object Storage is commonly used to archive and back up data, with use cases in virtual machine image, photo, video and music storage.

Object Storage provides a high degree of availability, throughput, and performance with its scale out architecture. Each object is replicated across multiple servers, residing within the same data center or across data centers, which mitigates the risk of network and hardware failure. In the event of hardware failure, Object Storage will automatically copy objects to a new location to ensure that there are always three copies available. Object Storage is an eventually consistent distributed storage platform; it sacrifices consistency for maximum availability and partition tolerance. Object Storage enables you to create a reliable platform by using commodity hardware and inexpensive storage.