Towards an Object Store

• Authors: Alain Azagury;Vladimir Dreizin;Michael Factor;Ealan Henis;Dalit Naor;Noam Rinetzky;Ohad Rodeh;Julian Satran;Ami Tavory;Lena Yerushalmi
• Venue: MSS '03 Proceedings of the 20 th IEEE/11 th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSS'03)
• Year: 2003

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 in-troduced 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 ac-cesssecurity and network security, leveraging existing security infrastructure.