Architecture
Modern day cloud storage is based on highly virtualized infrastructure and has the same characteristics as cloud computing in terms of agility, scalability, elasticity and multi-tenancy, and is available both off-premise (Amazon EC2) and on-premise (ViON Capacity Services) It is believed to have been invented by Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider in the 1960s. Since the sixties, cloud computing has developed along a number of lines, with Web 2.0 being the most recent evolution. However, since the internet only started to offer significant bandwidth in the nineties, cloud computing for the masses has been something of a late developer.
It is difficult to pin down a canonical definition of cloud storage architecture, but object storage is reasonably analogous. Cloud storage services like OpenStack, cloud storage products like EMC Atmos and Hitachi Cloud Services, and distributed storage research projects like OceanStore are all examples of object storage and infer the following guidelines.
Cloud storage is:
- made up of many distributed resources, but still acts as one
- highly fault tolerant through redundancy and distribution of data
- highly durable through the creation of versioned copies
- typically eventually consistent with regard to data replicas
Read more about this topic: Cloud Storage
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“Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)