What is Object Storage?

if we think about object storage which is kind of a newish tier object storage the idea is for relatively low performance storage at a relatively low cost that is designed to serve the needs of the internet workload and so by internet workloads i'm talking about web applications i'm talking about websites and website hosting and delivering content across the internet but also a way to find a new home for all of that data that we used to store on tape right we have to have a way to take big volumes of data write that down put it somewhere that is safe that is secure and where we can hold on to it for a long time for regulatory reasons legal reasons and other requirements that make it necessary for us to keep that data for a long amount of time so let's start off with what is an object and why do we call it object storage so the concept in object storage is that you have an object right now that object can be any kind of file there aren't really any file restrictions or anything like that there are some characteristics that are very important but as a general rule any kind of file can be an object so we'll throw a little object in there now there are four essential components to that object that make it usable in the computing sense right the first one is for every object we have to have an id we have to have some sort of a unique identifier that lets us know that what this object is when it comes time to retrieve it that's the first piece the second piece is obviously you've got to have some data you know what's the point of having a file and all of this information about it if you don't have the data itself so this could be an excel file it could be a video file it could be an audio file any kind of file but you've got to have the actual data itself the third piece that you have to have is metadata so what is metadata metadata is everything that you need to know about this file and about the data itself who created it when was it created what is it used for what is the file type how large is it the metadata is what makes it possible to go out and find it search it index it so that you can bring it up and use it whenever you need to because again all that's being displayed out right now is the id the id is not terribly useful and then the last thing that you have to have are your attributes now attributes are related to metadata they aren't exactly the same thing but they're close attributes can be are certain users allowed to override it are certain users allowed to download it are certain users allowed to delete it so the attributes are about the object itself rather than about the data but again those are those four essential components this is what you use when you actually create something so you've got your object here right and then what do you do with it well in the world of object storage which is unstructured you take all of your objects and you drop them into a bucket so let's do this on this side so imagine i have a bucket and my bucket can have a handle why not and so into my bucket i'm going to put all of these objects and now this is the neat part these buckets can be as big as you need them to be they can scale to hold billions of objects now it's not always a good idea to put billions of objects in it but they can in fact scale to that size and then what's really neat about object storage because remember we want to be able to use this for cold storage too right we need to put things in it that can never be deleted is whenever you the user you're going to interact with this thing by an api right so you're not ever going to interact with the buckets individually here we'll throw you in there you are you're using object storage it's great so you're going to take your objects you're going to drop them into this bucket now on the back end the magic of object storage is your object here call it o it is going to replicate out of this bucket the bucket is a virtual construct but we are going to take it and we are going to say all right well i have three physically separated devices and i'm going to take a copy of your object and i'm going to replicate it out into all three of them and my purpose in replicating them out into all three of those locations is data integrity data security that way if the physical device here right each of these buckets is going to reside on a physical device so we'll call this p1 p2 and p3 so we're going to replicate it out your object is going to be on three physical different devices so if there's a hardware problem or a network outage or whatever in p1 that's okay you've still got copies in p2 and p3 you can still get the data that you need now when we get into the details of object storage all of a sudden you start saying man there's a lot of complexity in this right so not only do i have the object buckets but the way that it's priced and metered and billed is kind of unique and people are asking me about how many gets and how many puts and how much storage am i taking up and the metering and building around object storage everyone that sells it has their own different metrics on it but here's the important parts to consider the first is what is your responsiveness or your response time right so from a price perspective the higher performance that you want and this is true for all cloud storage but the more performance you want the more it's going to cost if you have data that you have packaged up and it's data that for 20 years your company's been taking it writing it to tape sending that tape to vaults and storing it in vaults where it will probably never be seen again that can go into the very coldest of cold tears right that is going to be the least expensive and so we're going to call that cold times 10. that is the coldest of cold tears up from that where you need to get to it every so often but you don't really need to get to it much that's gonna be a two dollar sign one right we're gonna we're gonna charge a little bit more for that we're just gonna call that cold maybe this is data that you need to get to once every six months something like that but maybe you're earning a website and you are using these object storage buckets to host all of the assets for your website obviously that is going to cost a little bit more right because you are sending data out on a regular basis so that's going to get our three dollar signs and i'm going to call this one cold-ish it's not really warm because the concept of a warm tier doesn't really exist in object storage but it's cold-ish and so this is videos it is pictures it is physical files um and what makes object storage really neat is on the back end through the magic because remember you you're interacting via an api you're not interacting with these things directly you can do all kinds of nifty front-end things for it and that's the really neat part of object storage and that's the benefits of it so let's talk about some of them right um hosting videos for streaming over the internet perfect perfect use case for object storage because like i said before we can replicate these things out right so for your video streaming rather than just replicating it into three buckets that are all in the same place let's replicate it out globally let's replicate it out so that we are hosting those videos not just in their primary location but in three different locations in seven different countries around the world decreasing the latency for your users so that their streaming experience is better let's talk about another good use case um uh file sharing so let's imagine a company where you're collaborating on spreadsheets and powerpoints and things like that and you've got collaborators that work all over the world well for versioning purposes you can have different versions that overwrite the previous version as long as those attributes allow for it and so if i've got my friend eric who is working in london can create a file i can get a copy of that file make my changes to it upload it back in and i've got version two that's the metadata and then i can have a colleague in singapore sam who downloads that file makes some more changes to it uploads it back in version three again incrementing the metadata but that allows for this cross-globe collaboration on a single file type and it makes everybody's lives easier but we're doing it at very low cost much less expensive than trying to send files around via email because emails have to get stored in a much more expensive storage tier much less expensive than fedexing thumb drives around and again being able to be done in a secure manner because we have control over who can see and access these objects um other web hosting obviously is going to be important we talked about regulatory data before the regulatory data and cold storage let's say that you're involved in a digital archiving project and you're working with a university or library and you're taking digital photographs of manuscript documents and you want to host those out for everyone in the world to be able to see object storage perfect place to store that kind of data because again it's not getting accessed very often it is right once and then read many many many times and you can host it in a secure manner so hopefully you've enjoyed this this has been a good overview of object storage as always if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments i'll do my best to answer some of my colleagues at ibm well and if you have any other questions just let us know thank you so much for your time today if you have any questions please drop us a line below if you want to see more videos like this in the future please do like and subscribe and let us know and don't forget you can grow your skills and earn a badge with ibm cloud labs which are free browser-based interactive kubernetes labs that you can find more information on by looking below thanks again

Channel: IBM Technology

Views: 9,480

Keywords: Object Storage, Cloud Object Storage, cloud storage, IBM, IBM Cloud, data storage

Id: ZfTOQJlLsAs

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021