“Educating people on what object storage…clearly was the task five, six, seven years ago,” he tells Datanami. Whether to use public cloud or stay on prem is one of the biggest factors that goes into selecting a new big data repository, according to Mark Pastor, the director of product and solution marketing at Quantum, which sells the ActiveScale object storage system.

The question for organizations, then, is no longer whether they should store their massive collection of unstructured data in an object storage system (or a distributed file system), but rather, which one should they choose. When companies have tens of petabytes to store, object storage and distributed file systems are the leading contenders for the job. About the only downside is rudimentary performance. Other factors in object storage’s favor are nearly infinite scalability, low cost, and high availability, thanks to erasure coding. The standardization on the S3 API has helped grease the wheels for the massive shift in storage to object stores. The percentage of leaders saying they will deploying a hybrid cloud storage increases from 15% today to about 40% in four years, it found, and half of the world’s unstructured data will be in a software-defined storage system, compared to less than 20% today.Īpplications increasingly are being designed from the beginning to pull data from object stores and distributed file systems, usually over a RESTful interface, such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which has become the defacto standard for both storage systems. For instance, between now and 2024, the amount of unstructured data that is stored on object storage systems or distributed file systems will triple, Gartner says. Gartner shared some predictions about the growth of object stores in its report. Unstructured data is growing at a rate of 30% to 60% annually, which in turn is driving major growth in object storage system adoption, according to IT industry analyst Gartner, which published its latest Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage two weeks ago (the analyst group says the two product categories are in the process of becoming one, with “universal storage” that can behave as either object or file storage). Public clouds run the biggest and most popular object stores, but there are plenty of other options available for folks who want to store their own data on-prem and avoid the cost and lock-in associated with public clouds. As the data explosion continues to reverberate across the land, organizations are turning to object storage systems to keep it tidy and organized.

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