Manuvir Das, Vice President of Engineering at EMC, was interviewed by  David Floyer, CTO and Co-Founder of Wikibon and Dave Vellante, Wikibon Chief  Analyst at the recently concluded EMC World, talking in depth about Object.

There is a lot of interest in this topic, and many perceive it as the very future of the business. To understand the hype, Manuvir Das explained how Object is different from the File.

The two are somewhat similar, but the semantics of files is a sequence of  operations heading down the directory structure, and that has  limitations. When video files started to proliferate, and billions of files started emerging, placing such a large number of files in one directory  was simply out of the question. Thus, Object was designed for a world of  limitless scale.

There are a number of things that need to be stored, but there’s no deep  structure whatsoever; it’s “just one massive pull of things.” These things can be  spread across the globe, they are always available and they are accessible from  anywhere over the web.

Extrapolating, the new method, is more like http, while the old file  method was more like ftp protocol.

There is the action of placing objects, and then the action of getting  objects. It doesn’t get any easier. The challenge here is how to do this at  scale: how to process a large number of things and a small numbers of big things all at the same time.

Low-latency access to your data

Object functions in the world of http and the web, and the latency here is  much larger, so there is the potential to build systems that are much  cheaper. That is in fact the true value of Object: providing customers  with huge amounts of storage for a much lower price and simpler levels  of management.

However, many traditional applications were written for file data before  the invention of Object. The trick here is to build a system that can  give two views at the same time. Through an API call to ViPR, one can  view an Object data as a file share at a blazing performance level. In that respect, Isilon pairs perfectly with ViPR.

Customers are very excited about these services because there is a very  clear road map about how to take them forward. For customers relying on  file storage today, this means migration to the cloud. Think Isilon customers. With just a layer on top, they can have the best of both  worlds – file and object. As for existing Object customers, such as  Centera, ViPR Object is compatible with all of that.

This service will roll out in the second half of this year.