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Object Storage and POSIX Should Merge

Posted by timothy on from the left-as-an-exercise-for-the-reader dept.

storagedude writes: Object storage's low cost and ease of use have made it all the rage, but a few additional features would make it a worthier competitor to POSIX-based file systems, writes Jeff Layton at Enterprise Storage Forum. Byte-level access, easier application portability and a few commands like open, close, read, write and lseek could make object storage a force to be reckoned with.

'Having an object storage system that allows byte-range access is very appealing,' writes Layton. 'It means that rewriting applications to access object storage is now an infinitely easier task. It can also mean that the amount of data touched when reading just a few bytes of a file is greatly reduced (by several orders of magnitude). Conceptually, the idea has great appeal. Because I'm not a file system developer I can't work out the details, but the end result could be something amazing.'

3 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Why would you want this? by godrik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I do not understand this at the highest level. How is this an improvement over POSIX? My understanding is that object storage is essentially a dumbed-down file system where you have to read the entire object (file) at once. Or have to write the object (file) at once. Why does it improve anything? Is it just because the "address" can be a url? Just write that as a specific file system so that you can read/write to /dev/url/http/slashdot.org/ and be done with it.

    What am I missing?

    1. Re:Why would you want this? by radish · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It allows the implementation to make a lot of assumptions & simplifications, which in turn makes things like S3 possible. There's no way you could practically offer POSIX style FS access in a cloud-like environment.

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    2. Re:Why would you want this? by Salamander · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That is very untrue. I'm on the GlusterFS team, and we've had users providing "POSIX style FS access in a cloud-like environment" for years. Amazon recently started doing the same with EFS, and there are others. It's sure not easy, I wouldn't say any of the alternatives have all of the isolation or ease of use that they should, but it's certainly possible.

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