Object Store

Object Storage An object store (ObS) or object storage device (OSD) enables the creation of self-managed, shared and secure storage for storage networks. This moves lower-level functionalities such as space management into the storage device itself, where the device is accessed through a standard object interface. The standard object store device (OSD) interface was defined in the SNIA OSD working group. The protocol is embodied over SCSI and defines a new set of SCSI commands, standardized as a T10 protocol. An object store raises the level of abstraction presented by today's block devices. Instead of presenting the abstraction of a logical array of unrelated blocks, addressed by their index in the array (i.e., their Logical Block Address (LBA)), an object store appears as a collection of objects. An individual object is a container of storage (object-data and object-meta-data) that exposes an interface similar to a file, and presents the abstraction of a sparsely allocated array of bytes indexed from zero to infinity. The object store provides "fine-grain" object-level security, improved scalability by localizing space management, and improved management by allowing end-to-end management of semantically-meaningful entities.   Status Developed by IBM Haifa Object Store team: Prototype of a T10-compliant object store target T10 complaint OSD initiator for Linux (for iSCSI and FC) iSCSI target in software