Somewhat of a random question, can you point me to some state of the art research?
Somewhat of a random question, can you point me to some state of the art research?
With a standard fileshare, you need to walk the filesystem to retrieve your file - this incurs a ton of metadata overhead. It also means when you've got potentially billions of files in a directory, it can be slooooowww. All the metadata requests also make it very chatty - so doing it over a WAN link tends to be extremely painful if it works at all. Newer versions of SMB and NFS have done a lot to batch the metadata requests but they are still protocols meant to happen at extremely low latency inside a datacenter.
However, you touched a key point: object stores are all about throughput, not latency. You can store at a GB/s (if you have the pipes), but even checking if an object exists will cost you a few milliseconds.
We build clusters of low PB scale that have a TCO with everything from labor to hardware, from financing to electric, from routers to cables and can be run below 3€/TB. For that you can store data in Block(rbd, iscsi), Objekt(S3, swift) or Filestorage(CephFS, NFS, SMB), high available on Supermicro hardware in any datacenter worldwide.
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