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Object Storage – Time for Differentiation and Diversification

From: Gigaom

I recently started to work on new research about object storage, and I’ll be writing a report about it soon. As you may have noticed, object storage has finally found its place in enterprise IT. There are several reasons for that, but the most important is the success of Amazon AWS S3. In fact, the popularity of this public cloud storage service influenced the development of both standard access methods and applications that can take advantage of it.

Thank You AWS

S3 is not 100% “standard,” meaning that S3 is not regulated by organizations like SNIA, and Amazon is not very open when it comes to sharing information with others – especially if “others” are potential competitors or private cloud players. Also, private cloud is a non-existent word in Amazon’s vocabulary. This didn’t change the result in the end, many small and large players started to implement their solutions starting from the APIs trying to match AWS S3 behavior as much as possible, and most of them did it successfully in the end.

AWS S3 was launched in 2006, it was the first service for Amazon and, still today, it is one of the most used services and, probably, profitable. In one way or the other, directly or indirectly, practically every one of their customers uses it. At the same time, with more and more organizations looking at public and hybrid cloud, many hardware and storage vendors added S3 interfaces to their products and now S3 clients are practically available from every solution that needs a secondary storage option (and in some cases S3 is considered the only storage option).

Read more at Gigaom.