AWS launched Amazon S3 Object Storage in 2006, to meet what it perceived at the time to be a monumental gap with the existing storage solutions. Object Storage, unlike traditional hieratic solutions, offered a simple software defined access layer that could easily be integrated into existing applications, accessible from anywhere on the internet and the ability to grow the underlying storage exponentially. The initial intent was to provide large amounts of unstructured data closer to the application and to the consumer of that data. IDC predicts that by 2025, the world will see 175 zettabytes of data, which is an increase of 33 zettabytes since 2018.
GARTNER’s Assumption
- By 2024, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object storage on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, compared with 2020.
- By 2024, 40% of I&O leaders will implement at least one hybrid cloud storage capability, up from 15% in 2020.
- By 2024, 50% of the global unstructured data storage capacity will be deployed as software-defined storage (SDS) on-premises or in the public cloud, up from less than 20% in 2020.
All IT organizations are always looking for the means and mechanism to innovate their infrastructure and provide technologies to advance their business. Unlike the previous decades, we are at the precipice of a monumental shift in the way IT organizations consume new technology. Traditionally, organizations were siloed by an individual disciplines, but now businesses are demanding that their technology teams leverage a more agile approach. This means that automation and provisioning of the underlying infrastructure is a key component to product delivery.
As we have come to know, the public cloud is uniquely positioned to provide a wealth of fee-based services to consume. This model works exceedingly well for new development projects but struggles at times to meet the needs of well-established applications or legacy workloads. Due to these factors, adoption of new technologies and processes tend to be difficult to implement in a public cloud & OpEx focused world.
LightEdge being more than a colocation company, we are positioning ourselves as a technology enablement partner. Providing innovative and critical cloud-based solutions to our customers through an approach that focuses on our customers business needs, all within a highly secure and compliant framework.
Object Storage is a pivotal component to LightEdge’s cloud portfolio. This solution has been designed and engineered to be highly resilient and accessible. Built using the object storage technology, this solution providers 100% S3 API compatibility. One of the key differentiators that we focused on while implementing this solution was the struggle that most organization have with security around their Object Storage data in the public cloud.
As with all of our products, we took a security first approach. This not only provided appropriate out-of-the-box policies which secured data, but also provided a means and mechanism for validation and auditing based on your organization’s regulatory requirements. This all culminates into an enhanced onboarding experience with knowledgeable technicians to ensure that all aspects of the deployment are met.
Key Benefits to Object Storage
More Accessible: Object storage is driven by metadata, and with this level of classification for every piece of data, you can sort and search files easily.
Infinite Storage: Object storage is not hardware dependent (not restricted to a single server or NAS).
Reduction in Cost: Due to the scale-out nature of object storage, it’s less costly to store all your data.
Optimization of resources: Because object storage does not have a filing hierarchy and the metadata is completely customizable, there are far fewer hardware limitations than with file or block storage.
Use Cases
Ransomware
As we have all become aware, ransomware has continued to be a growing threat. The logical question is how your organization can protect itself.
It’s so important to have a recovery strategy in place. One way to address ransomware’s encryption is through secure backup. If you can roll back to a previous version of your data – captured before the infection occurred – you can bypass the infection by performing a restore and get back into business.
Because Object Storage can be made immutable, data remains as written with WORM (Write Once, Read Many) technology. This WORM feature protects data for the retention period you specify. During that time, the data can neither be modified nor deleted, creating an additional security layer. Furthermore, the data is immediately accessible which eliminates the need for a lengthy backup process.
Also, policy-based data protection features will let you replicate that data to multiple sites, so your data is protected from site-specific threats as well.
Backup & Recovery
In doing backup and recovery, you typically need a storage target. The best storage target is one that is going to be available across multiple locations or data centers. With an Object Storage solution, you are creating a single storage environment that is automatically replicated to multiple data centers. So, when data is put into the object storage system, it ultimately exists in all of those locations. The benefit of this architecture is if one of the sites is inaccessible, you are still able to conduct backup and recovery operations from another location.
Compliance and Cloud Archiving
Generally, there are two reasons for archiving data to Object Storage. The first use case is around creating a central location for unstructured data, like documents and media to be stored. Frequently in the corporate world, we find that teams have the need to share and collaborate. A popular archiving and file sharing solution unofficially used in many organizations today is Dropbox.
This works for unstructured data types. For instance:
- Research Data
- Media (images, video, audio files, etc.)
- Word Processing Documents
- Presentations
- Other kinds of business documents
Cloud-Native Applications
With Object Storage, you can upload any amount of data and access it anywhere to deploy applications faster and reach more end users. Storing data in an Object Store means you have access to S3 API, services for machine learning and analytics to innovate and optimize your cloud-native applications.
- Available and durable
Microservices are decoupled from data stores and rely on the storage environment to keep data available.
- Programable
Developers can use the Amazon S3 API to build S3 calls into code so microservices can programmatically access the data they need.
- Secured shared data
Data may be shared by multiple microservices that are parts of different applications.
- Visibility
Data may be shared by multiple microservices that are parts of different applications.
- Time to market
Cloud-native applications implement features faster because a microservice delivers its functionality when ready without having to wait for the monolith application to be complete. Object Storage provides immediate and elastic capacity for both internal employee applications delivered by IT teams and external customer applications delivered by product teams.
Reasons you need Object Storage
- Object Storage is Built for Scale
- Object Storage Increases Data Integrity at Scale
- Object Storage offer Different, Simplified Manageability
- Object Storage is the Language of the Cloud
LightEdge Can Help You Meet Your Storage Needs
Whether you’re looking for a performance storage solution for your application data, a compliant place to retain and dispose of critical documents, or an immutable object storage solution due to rising ransomware concerns, LightEdge can offer the solutions you need at any of our geographically-dispersed data centers.
Let’s work together to ensure your secure, managed, rapidly scalable data storage solution that satisfies any workload and achieves maximum performance. With high-performance, all-flash SSD SAN, our cutting-edge technology and hybrid configurations offer the customization you expect from a trusted partner. We’ll also monitor and troubleshoot your system 24/7/365 to make sure your mission-critical IT stays secure, no matter what. Let’s schedule a call today to get started.
