Today’s apps aren’t your father’s apps. Applications developed today take for granted things that were not even thinkable not that long ago — especially in the storage space. The scale that is needed by modern day applications was never envisioned when traditional shared storage was invented. (NFS and SMB were released in 1984, five years before Tim Berners-Lee would invent the world-wide web.)
It wasn’t that long ago that developers would assume an app would run on a single server and access a single filesystem. Once apps started to run on clusters, most “clusters” were really just active-active pairs, or even active-passive pairs. Of course, there were a few truly clustered applications that ran on several nodes. However, all of these systems assumed one thing: a filesystem or LUN that could be shared by all nodes, or synchronously replicated storage that mimicked that behavior.
Modern day developers assume they can have an infinite number of nodes to run their application. The ubiquity of the public cloud has made this possible; more VMs or containers is only a few API calls away. This is what has allowed companies like Netflix — who runs their entire infrastructure in Amazon EC2 — to scale to the level that they have.
The ubiquity of VMs and containers in the cloud is also what has made modern day applications like Hadoop popular. Hadoop is built from the ground up with the understanding that it will run on a cluster of machines, not a single machine. In fact, Hadoop is built to run in the cloud. And yet, the filesystem built into Hadoop (HDFS) is a non-clustered, non-shareable filesystem that uses local storage in each node.
When Hadoop developers needed to add a “filesystem” that all nodes could access, they chose to use the S3 protocol and not something like NFS or SMB. This is because object storage is built for modern day applications that can run anywhere and read and write from storage that can be anywhere. Where NFS and SMB assumed latencies that were typically only found within a data center, object storage protocols don’t assume that at all. In fact, they assume just the opposite. As far as data consistency between multiple locations, the eventual consistency method of object storage distribution works well with read-heavy applications like data warehousing. But if eventual consistency is an issue for a given application, developers can easily take that into consideration when writing data.
StorageSwiss Take
Object storage and its associated protocols are a much better match for modern day applications that are written in and for the cloud. The more an application makes use of modern day development and deployment methods, such as the use of public or private cloud-based VMs and containers, the more object storage makes sense for that application.
About Caringo
Caringo was founded in 2005 to change the economics of storage by designing software from the ground up to solve the issues associated with data protection, management, organization and search at massive scale. Caringo’s flagship product, Swarm, eliminates the need to migrate data into disparate solutions for long-term preservation, delivery and analysis—radically reducing total cost of ownership. Today, Caringo software is the foundation for simple, bulletproof, limitless storage solutions for the Department of Defense, the Brazilian Federal Court System, City of Austin, Telefónica, British Telecom, Ask.com, Johns Hopkins University and hundreds more worldwide. Visit www.caringo.com to learn more.
W. Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Mr. Preston is a writer and has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences around the world. Preston’s mission is to arm today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.
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Reblogged this on The Storage Tank and commented:
Here is a great little article talking about how NAS is giving way to Object based storage. Thanks to Mr. Backup at StorageSwiss.com for the article. Look for an update on the Spectrum Scale product this week on object based storage for hybrid clouds here on The Storage Tank.