Object Storage Overview

What is Object Storage?

It is object based storage designed (can be used for other things too, more below) mainly for archival data, media distribution and static data.  It holds the data in a flat structure, no directories; it embeds related metadata and a globally unique identifier into the data.

An example would be hosting video files, you could add the details of the video encoding, director, cast, description, release dates, etc.  Typical storage would require a relational database to house this additional information, object storage will hold all this information in the data.

It is API driven at its core so can be integrated to almost anything, but you will need to write API calls to do most interactions with the data.

Softlayer’s Object storage is based on OpenStack Swift but has had some improvements.

It is extremely redundant, holding multiple copies of the data across multiple servers, multiple drives, in one data center and all updates are through proxy servers to ensure integrity.

It is truly elastic allowing you to grow and shrink storage requirements as you use it, you will be charged on the peak usage for the month and you will also be charged on the internet outbound transfers of object data.

Not recommended for data sets that need to be manipulated/changed often.

You have a per object size limit of 5 GB, unless the software your using will automatically split the file for you

You have a few ways of accessing data within object storage.

  1. Mount object storage directly to a Linux or Windows server with 3rd party software such as Cloudfuse https://github.com/redbo/cloudfuse

CloudBerry http://www.cloudberrylab.com/

Cyberduck https://cyberduck.io/?l=en

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/learning/how-mount-object-storage

  1. Interacting via the API or commandline

SoftLayer currently supports PHP, JAVA, Ruby and Python on the Object Storage API.

http://sldn.softlayer.com/blog/waelriac/Managing-SoftLayer-Object-Storage-Through-REST-APIs

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/procedure/how-do-i-access-object-storage-command-line

  1. Connecting via SFTP, WinSCP

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/procedure/connect-object-storage-using-sftp

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/procedure/accessing-object-storage-using-winscp

  1. Access via the Softlayer GUI

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/procedure/access-object-storage-screen

For more detailed information on Object Storage please visit the following sites:

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/learning/introduction-object-storage

http://sldn.softlayer.com/article/introduction-object-storage

Here are a few interesting ideas for Object Storage use

FTP/SFTP for Softlayer Object Storage

https://sldn.softlayer.com/blog/kmcdonald/FTPSFTP-SoftLayer-Object-Storage

Use SLDT to transfer data to Softlayer Object Storage

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-softlayer-sldt-trs/index.html

Using a Quantastor device to serve Object Storage

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/procedure/how-can-i-setup-quantastor-access-object-storage

Globally load balance Object Storage

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/articles/global-load-balancing-options

Leave a comment