Experiences Building an Object-Based Storage System based on the OSD T-10 Standard

With ever increasing storage demands and management costs, object based storage is on the verge of becoming the next standard storage interface. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) ratified the object based storage interface standard (also referred to as OSD T-10) in January 2005. In this paper we present our experiences building a reference implementation of the T10 standard based on an initial implementation done at Intel Corporation. Our implementation consists of a file system, object based target and a security manager. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reference implementation suite that is as complete as ours. Efforts are underway to open source our implementation very soon. We also present performance analysis of our implementation and compare it with an iSCSI based SAN and NFS storage configurations. In future, we intend to use this implementation as a platform to explore different forms of storage intelligence.