Object storage is primed for growth, according to Mark Goros , CEO of Caringo, a provider of object storage software. Goros predicts 2013 will include a number of advancements and revelations in cloud services, Big Data analytics and mobility thanks to wider adoption of object storage.


"As the appetite for storage has exploded, more companies are adopting object storage," said Goros. "The shift to object storage is being driven by IT trends, including the adoption of cloud services, emerging analytics applications, BYOD and mobility, as well as the market momentum of research, healthcare, government and life sciences."

Goros offered the following predictions for object storage in 2013:

1. Open cloud adoption will drive the need for differentiation via storage
Many think storage is a commodity but choosing the right storage solution isn't about technology or hardware – it's about data, how you access it and more importantly how you protect it. The continued adoption of OpenStack and CloudStack will expose the limitations of Swift and other basic object stores.

Service providers that want to compete on more than just price understand that the market will demand enterprise class object storage solutions that provide variable data durability and governance and compliance features.

2. Big Data chatter will increasingly focus on Hadoop and object storage
In 2012 we saw most analysts and companies start to agree on the definition of Big Data – sort of. As the velocity, variability and volume of data increases to petabyte scale, moving compute processes near the data, as Hadoop does, will be the most efficient way to analyze it. This means that the ideal storage solution for most Hadoop implementations will need to support this level of scale while providing ubiquitous access.

In 2013 it will become clear that to be cost effective and efficient, organizations will need to evolve the underlying hardware to take advantage of continuous cost and performance advancements and employ a combination of replication and erasure coding protection schemes depending on where data is in its lifecycle.

3. Object storage will increasingly enable mobility apps
Mobility applications create an unbelievable amount of information. This goes beyond the obvious rich media. There is also usage information, location information, and the resulting analysis. Mobility applications will need to continue to access this information for a number of years.

The only way to enable this, economically and efficiently, is with object storage on highly dense commodity hardware that easily scales with minimal management. Moreover, the BYOD world demands that metadata gets stored with your data (not in a separate database) to give pure mobility to your objects. They will carry with them security, authentication and context that make them usable anywhere, anytime on any device.