"Slow Uptake for Object Storage
OSD has long been viewed as a significant move beyond the
communication, scalability and security limits of block and SCSI
technology, but has yet to catch on beyond high-performance storage
environments.
"Brent Welch, director of architecture at Panasas, which has
been a pioneer in both OSD and pNFS development, noted that
"introducing new storage standards is a slow process. Even
something like iSCSI that was only a slight variation on an
existing standard took a long time. OSD is a fairly radical
standard by comparison, and we expect widespread adoption to take
time."
"Panasas has used OSD and pNFS to develop a highly scalable
parallel file system. "Sun doesn't have products in this area, and
in fact it acquired Lustre (CFS), which is also an object-based
file system," said Welch. "However, Lustre doesn't use the standard
OSD interface, but an 'object-like' interface of its own
design."
"Panasas has also invested in open source Linux implementations
of OSD targets and initiators, and a freestanding file system
called exofs that runs over OSD. "Our goal is to foster more
research and experimentation in this standard interface," Welch
said."
