Wikibon Co-Founder David Floyer called DDN’s WOS 2.5 release a big step forward for object file systems. He discussed two major trends – data consolidation and application consolidation, which will be enabled by the continuing emergence of the flash technology. Flash is the ability to access data in microseconds, not milliseconds, which makes it 100 times faster and per access, it’s 100 times cheaper as well.

The problems with traditional storage and file systems is that they run out of capability when they encounter large amounts of data. Data storage has grown into billions of files that customers wish to access, which break down traditional file system. Object file systems extract the file from the hardware itself, so it enables a more efficient way of handling data. The object file systems scale much better than traditional systems as consolidation takes place.

One of the constraints of the object stores has been poor performance. Although it’s easy to access and easy to program, because the extraction layer is above the hardware, the performance has not been the best. It has mainly been limited to applications, such as data archiving that have relatively few database calls where you write once and access very few times. One of the significant improvements in WOS 2.5 is that the handle of an object, or the way you get to it, has been made such that you can access the data directly. The locality of the data can be determined from the handle directly, thus access time to data is significantly reduced.

In terms of how companies should ready themselves for WOS 2.5, Floyer said, “Object file systems are in their early life, but they’re going to be increasingly important, and CIOs and CTOs should be preparing to use these as the file system underneath the database systems and the applications.”  See the whole segment with Kristin Feledy and David Floyer on the Morning NewsDesk show.