As #objectstorage benefits become more enticing to enterprises for internal storage uses and not just for cloud, vendors are overcoming its drawbacks. Since it was first conceived in the mid-1990s, object storage has grown to be one of the largest methods of storing data in use today. The development and commercialization of object storage happened nearly in lockstep with the technology industry that is still its primary user by far, the cloud. Recent advances and shifts in data storage technology have IT buyers wondering if enterprise object storage could become as common as cloud object storage.
Object storage was developed by academic and business researchers to be able to handle what they could see coming down the highway -- a more rapidly increasing amount of digital information that would need to be stored somewhere. So the goal of object storage, right out of the gate, was storage that was less expensive to run and expand. Object storage achieved the first goal by eliminating the need to address every single block of writeable space in the storage medium individually, which is necessary in file and block storage. That allowed more of the medium itself to be used to actually hold data, not information about how to find that data.
The second goal was realized by eliminating any hierarchical structure of folders and treating the storage as a flat address space or a storage pool. This made it easier for the storage to expand as more data made it necessary. Picture an object storage pool as an enormous wading pool that can be added on to in any dimension. The water -- or data, in this metaphor -- simply flows into the expanded space.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Is-enterprise-object-storage-ready-to-lead
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