Prepare For Object Storage In The Enterprise

There's a great deal of talk these days about object-based storage. It's an architecture that delivers massive scalability, rock-bottom cost, high automation, tremendous flexibility, and improved control. But for it to deliver on these promises, you need to cut through the hype and determine if the drawbacks will prevent object storage from meeting your technical and business needs. Poor performance, high data change rates, capacity sprawl, and lack of standards will prevent object storage from becoming ubiquitous, but it has the potential to significantly improve storage economics, ease of use, and control when mapped to the right workloads. Today, those include archiving, Web 2.0 apps, imaging applications, emerging apps designed with objects in mind, and cloud storage environments.