IBM Cloud Object Storage Concepts and Architecture

An IBM Redpaper publication

Note: A new draft version of this publication is now available

Published 27 October 2021

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IBM Form #: REDP-5537-02
(42 pages)

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Authors: Alexander Gavrin, Bradley Leonard, Hao Jia, Johan Verstrepen, Jussi Lehtinen, Lars Lauber, Patrik Jelinko, Raj Shah, Steven Pratt, Vasfi Gucer

Abstract

Object Storage is the primary storage solution that is used in the cloud and on-premises solutions as a central storage platform for unstructured data. Object Storage is growing more popular for the following reasons:


  • It is designed for exabyte scale.
  • It is easy to manage and yet meets the growing demands of enterprises for a broad set of applications and workloads.
  • It allows users to balance storage cost, location, and compliance control requirements across data sets and essential applications.

IBM® Cloud Object Storage (IBM COS) system provides industry-leading flexibility that enables your organization to handle unpredictable but always changing needs of business and evolving workloads.

IBM COS system is a software-defined storage solution that is hardware aware. This awareness allows IBM COS to be an enterprise-grade storage solution that is highly available and reliable and uses commodity x86 servers. IBM COS takes full advantage of this hardware awareness by ensuring that the server performs optimally from a monitoring, management, and performance perspective.

The target audience for this IBM Redpaper publication is IBM COS architects, IT specialists, and technologists.

Table of contents

Differences between block, file, and object storage
Use cases for Object Storage
Flexible deployment options of IBM Cloud Object Storage
IBM Cloud Object Storage architecture
IBM Cloud Object Storage read and write operations
Features and functionality

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