Object Based Storage ... Why not? It's the future of storage.

To start, we all require digital storage and will require more of it moving forward. Heck, look at the small limited capacity of those 5 1/4" floppy disks we once used, look at the capacity of the first iPod, look at the capacity of that SAN you purchased 5 years ago and have far outgrown! ... as time goes by, you need more and more storage for your ever increasing amounts of data. Nobody ever sat down to address their decreasing storage needs for the next year.

But those disks we use and the deterioration, the failure they bring to the table. That translates to data loss, to data corruption ... it's gonna happen, you know it ... just give it enough time. You are aware of it 'cause that's why you've been storing stuff on tape if you need to store it for say 7 years, 10 years, or longer. 

I posted some time ago an article on the lifespan of different media. For spinning mechanical hard drives (HDDs), their lifespan is 3-5 years. For the new screaming fast solid state drives (SSDs), they can last 5-10 years but keep in mind that lifespan is dependent upon write cycles. 

Over the years, we've done some really nifty stuff to make digital storage resilient to failure and to protect, arguably, the most valuable asset a company has beyond its people ... the company’s data. RAID, synchronous mirroring, and asynchronous mirroring are examples of means we’ve come up with to protect data at the storage level. Storage Virtualization leveraging features such as thin provisioning and virtual volumes/virtual LUNS attempted to make life easier with the inevitable expansion of data storage. 

But then there was cost. 

High cost.

Yep … check out the price of drives purchased from your storage vendor for their SAN. Yes, usually a tad expensive I'd say.

But it's not just the cost of the storage hardware and software, it's the specialized skill sets required to administer that storage solution that also comes at a premium.

So now what? 

Object Storage. Why not? Object Storage is the future of storage.

Heck, Amazon didn't build S3 using traditional block storage technology. They used Object Storage. 

Today, you can too leverage Object Storage, and you can do it without having to write to APIs to address that Object Storage. 

Easy to use Object Storage.

So how? 

StorageCraft's Exablox Object Storage solution ... that's how. 

So, check this out:

You can purchase 1 to 7 Exablox Oneblox appliances that house 12 3.5" HDDs (SSD chassis model coming VERY soon) which will be configured into what's called a "Ring" ... yes, that's the lingo ... "An Exablox 'Ring' can be made up of 1 to 7 OneBlox 4312 units each housing 12 3.5" SAS or SATA HDDs". 

... and ... 

You can -> SOURCE YOUR OWN DRIVES!

Yep, that's right ... you can source your own drives. And, that'll hold true for SSDs when the new SSD capable Exablox OneBlox 5210 model comes out VERY soon!

Now, in the middle of all this excitement, let's not forget some of the other advantages and features that an Exablox Object Storage solution can bring to the table: 

• Multi-tenant Cloud Management or management via a Virtual Appliance for dark networks
• Storage accessed via NFS or SMB/CIFS shares 
• Per share storage policy configuration
• Inline fixed or variable length deduplication
• Inline compression: on/off
• Continuous Data Protection via snapshots with corresponding retention policies
• One to many remote replication
• Data integrity maintained with data being written out in triplicate as objects
• Downtime is eliminated with physical failure, replacement and expansion

Look, to add a new OneBlox node to a Ring takes about 5 minutes ... basically configure the network settings and let it be discovered. 

Quite easy, isn’t it? 

It’s absolutely cost effective. 

It’s rational. 

Simply, Object Storage is the future and StorageCraft can take you there via their Exablox Object Storage solution … and leave your company with some extra cash in the process.

Rich Werhun