Is Yahoo launching a cloud storage solution : MObStor

While rest of the world is busy with Microsoft and Google, Yahoo might be preparing to launch MObStor which they tout as the “Unstructured Storage for the Internet”.

While comparing MObStor to the various Cloud computing storage solutions already available, Navneet Joneja, Sr. Product Manager, mentions Facebook’s Haystack to describe MObStor’s architectural design. He also points out that though Facebook’s Haystack was optimized to store photographs, MObStor was optimized for diverse set of use cases.

Its a REST based, browser-accessible API with simple security model, and content-agnostic storage features. The focus of this service seems to be fast, reliable, secure storage with the option of allowing customers to layer additional services on top of the core service. It claims it would be optimized for high performance and high availability (who doesn’t).

Here is more from the Yahoo Developer Network Blog

Facebook's Haystack is based on commodity storage. While MObStor does support commodity storage, it doesn't require it. Instead, we have a storage-layer abstraction we call the ObjectStore. The ObjectStore encapsulates the key storage operations we need to perform, and allows us to have many underlying physical object stores. This allows us to mix, for example, filer-based storage with commodity storage. The upper layers have the routing intelligence that determines which ObjectStore a given piece of data is stored in. However, like Haystack, we do support high request rates using our own optimized ObjectStore written to run on commodity hardware - with one important difference. While Haystack identifies every object using a 64-bit photo key, all objects in MObStor are accessible through logical (i.e., client-supplied) URLs, not object IDs.

In MObStor, the storage layer maintains the mapping between logical URLs and physical storage, and can use any means to do so - the implementation is encapsulated within the storage layer. Needless to say, this operation is a potential performance bottleneck, so we've carefully optimized the algorithms used and the hardware that they run on.

Now with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in the picture the last shoe might finally drop.

Comments

Yahoo! “Unstructured Storage for the Internet” MObStor | SolSie.com said…
[...] Yahoo! Via Royans.net] Technorati Tags: Yahoo,MObStor,Cloud,Storage tweetmeme_url = [...]
1:31 AM
Virtual web symphony said…
I my opinion cloud's time is still 5-6 years away. Cloud will continue to remain in isolated intranets for another 5-6 years. Cross platform intranet or internet based clouds will mature only after next 5-6 years.
12:40 AM
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