Managing Complex Object Stores

Object stores have found a home in the cloud and in data centers, becoming the repository for long-lived and high-value data. They abstract away the location of an object, giving them the flexibility to implement higher forms of redundancy. This redundancy protects against device (e.g. hard disk) failure but also against failures of entire nodes or even entire data centers. With erasure coding and proper system design, object storage can deliver very high durability and availability economically. Abstracting away object location also allows object stores to scale to sizes and topologies difficult to achieve with filesystems. The user of an…