1 research outputs found
Towards Marrying Files to Objects
To deal with the constant growth of unstructured data, vendors have deployed
scalable, resilient, and cost effective object-based storage systems built on
RESTful web services. However, many applications rely on richer file-system
APIs and semantics, and cannot benefit from object stores. This leads to
storage sprawl, as object stores are deployed alongside file systems and data
is accessed and managed across both systems in an ad-hoc fashion. We believe
there is a critical need for a transparent merger of objects and files,
consolidating data into a single platform. Such a merger would extend the
capabilities of both object and file stores while preserving existing semantics
and interfaces. In this position paper, we examine the viability of unifying
object stores and file systems, and the various design tradeoffs that exist.
Then, using our own implementation of an object-based, POSIX-complete file
system, we experimentally demonstrate several critical design considerations