We have heard a lot about Object Storage but really how much impact has it had on the storage market so far? EMC make lots of noise about Atmos for sure but I hear very much conflicting stories on the take-up; NetApp bought Bycast and I hear a deafening silence; HDS have HCP and seem to be doing okay in some niche markets; Dell have their DX platform and there are many smaller players.
But where is it being deployed? Niche markets like medical and legal uses but general deployment? I hear of people putting Object Storage behind NAS gateways and using it as a cheaper NAS but is that not missing the point. If you are just using NAS to dump files as objects into an Object Store, you are not taking advantage of much of the meta-data which is the advantage of Object Storage and you continue to build systems which are file-system centric. And if you really want a cheaper NAS, there might be better ways to do it.
For Object Storage to take off, we need a suite of applications and APIs which are object-centric; we need a big education effort around Object Storage but not aimed at the storage community but at the development and data community.
Object Storage is currently being sold to the wrong people; don’t sell it to Storage Managers, we’ll manage it when there is a demand for it but we are probably not the right people to go out and educate people about it. Yes, we are interested in it but developers never listen to us anyway.
I hear Storage Managers saying ‘we’d be interested in implementing an Object Storage solution but we don’t know what we’d use it for’; this isn’t that surprising as most Storage Managers are not developers or that application-centric.
If you don’t change your approach, if you don’t educate users about the advantages, if you continue to focus on the infrastructure; then we’ll be asking this question again and again. Object Storage changes infrastructure but it is probably more akin to a middle-ware sale than an infrastructure sale.