Today's SAN architectures promise unmediated host access to storage (i.e., without going through a server). To achieve this promise, however, we must address several issues and opportunities raised by SANs, including security, scalability and management. Object storage, such as introduced by the NASD work [14], is a means of addressing these issues and opportunities. An object store raises the level of abstraction presented by a storage control unit from an array of 512 byte blocks to a collection of objects. 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. This paper presents a detailed description of how an object store works and describes the design of Antara, our prototype object store. For a cache hit workload, our pure software prototype is able to service roughly 14000 4K I/O requests per second. We also present a layered security model for an object store which separates concerns of access security and network security, leveraging existing security infrastructure.
Digital Preservation
deals with ensuring that digital data stored today can be read
and interpreted
tens or hundreds of years from now. At the heart of any solution to the preservation problem lies a storage component. This paper characterizes the requirements for such a component, defines its desirable properties and presents the need for preservation-aware storage systems. Our research is conducted as part of
CASPAR
, a new European Union (EU) integrated project on the preservation of data for very long periods of time. The position presented was developed while designing the storage foundation for the CASPAR software framework.
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