Dell Adds Containerized Object Storage to Portfolio

Dell Technologies today added a containerized object storage offering designed to be deployed either on an all-flash XF960 appliance or as software that can be hosted in the cloud or on top of a Kubernetes cluster.

Anahad Dhillon, senior manager for product management for Dell Unstructured Data Storage, said the goal is to make it possible for IT teams to employ S3-compatible object storage across a hybrid IT environment.

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When deployed as an appliance, the ObjectScale XF960 makes use of NVMe connectivity to enable up to 4.3GB/sec reads and 3.3GB/sec writes per node. Compatible with the container storage interface (CSI), the platform is also designed to scale out across as many as 900 nodes, added Dhillon.

Based on the same code used in the rest of the Dell Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) portfolio, this offering adds auditing and compliance capabilities with support for S3 bucket logging and enhanced S3 replication along with consensus-based protection of rules and self-encrypting (SED) drives.

Widely employed for data protection, object storage is now being used also to drive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, he said.

Developers of modern applications are defaulting to object storage because, compared to alternatives, it reduces the total cost of IT infrastructure, he added.

While the cost per terabyte of storage continues to decline, the amount of storage being consumed continues to grow exponentially. As a result, many IT teams are looking for ways to reduce the total cost of storage at a time when many more stateful cloud-native applications are now being deployed.

Of course, there are those who insist that only stateless applications should run on Kubernetes clusters, with data stored on an external platform. However, there are increasing numbers of greenfield applications that don’t have access to an existing storage system. In addition, there is more emphasis on processing and analyzing data at the point where it is being created and consumed versus, for example, always transferring data into a cloud service.

Regardless of approach, an object storage platform that makes it simpler to move data both into and out of the cloud gives IT teams a level of flexibility for storing data as it is created and ultimately ages.

Object storage systems have, of course, been made available by cloud service providers for years, but many IT teams are just now starting to make use of them beyond the cloud. As such, many of them are just now coming to terms with determining what data to store on these platforms versus using legacy storage systems.

One way or another, the volume of data stored using object storage is only going to continue to grow. As such, IT teams will need to add additional expertise to manage these platforms alongside existing storage systems that are not likely to be replaced any time soon. If anything, the management of storage is only going to increase in complexity as the types of data that need to be stored continue to become more varied.