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A Tale of Two Object Stores

As the volume of unstructured data they need to store has grown over the past few years, organizations have discovered that their data is pushing up to, or over, the limitations of classic block and file based storage systems. Object storage systems, such as Amplidata’s AmpliStor, Data Direct Networks' WOS, and Amazon’s S3, provide the ability to store huge numbers of objects across exabytes of disks.

More recently, the designers of new storage systems are using object storage concepts on the back end of their systems while actually providing more traditional block or file access.

Traditional object stores -- although it seems a bit strange to call object stores traditional -- present their data through RESTful, HTTP-based Get/Put APIs. Relieved of the overhead of maintaining a hierarchical directory structure and having to support in-place data updates with all the locking overhead that implies, object stores can more easily scale-out to enormous dimensions.

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