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
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“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)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)