An Overview of On-Premise File and Object Storage Access Protocols

This tutorial will provide a technical overview of the latest distributed file and object access protocols. The goal is to provide administrators and developers with the knowledge to choose the best data access protocol for their new applications or determine if their existing file-based applications are good candidates for being ported to using an object access protocol.

For decades, distributed file systems such as NFS have been the sole method for applications to work with remote data. The emergence of mobile devices, tablets, and the Internet of Things, combined with the global demand for cloud storage, has given rise to numerous new object storage access protocols. While these new protocols are simpler in many ways, and offer several new features, they also come with their own set of access semantics that may cause problems for applications.

We will cover and contrast NFSv4/v4.1 with both the S3 and Swift object protocols, as well as discuss the challenges of providing both file and object access to a single dataset, including such topics as common identity, ACL, and quota management.