Object storage is ideal for solving the increasing problems of data growth. As more and more data is generated, storage systems have to grow at the same pace. What happens when you try to expand a block-based storage system beyond a hundred terabytes or beyond multiple petabytes? You may run into durability issues, hard limitations with the storage infrastructure that you currently have, or your management overhead may go through the roof.

Solving the provisioning management issues presented by the expansion of storage at this scale is where object storage shines. Items such as static Web content, data backup, and archives are fantastic use cases. Object-based storage architectures can be scaled out and managed simply by adding additional nodes. The flat namespace organization of the data, in combination with its expandable metadata functionality, facilitates this ease of use.

Another advantage to object storage is its responsiveness to the need for resiliency while mitigating costs. Objects remain protected by storing multiple copies of data over a distributed system; if one or more nodes fail, the data can still be made available, in most cases, without the application or the end-user ever being impacted. In most cases, at least three copies of every file are stored. This addresses common issues including drive failures, bit-rot, server and failures, and power outages. This distributed storage design for high availability allows less-expensive commodity hardware to be used because the data protection is built into the object architecture.