Cloud technology has made huge strides and is now widely used in various sectors of the enterprise. Object storage scales significantly better and is far more cost-effective than previous solutions such as NAS, but enterprises are still skeptical about cloud storage performance. To date, enterprises have focused their use of cloud storage on backup, foregoing the benefits they could gain using this storage tier for active data sets and applications ranging from active archive to Tier 2-3 workloads currently running on traditional storage sub-systems.
Adding a caching strategy to an object storage-based system helps address performance concerns and enables users to access files stored in the cloud more efficiently. While performance is always important, it is particularly crucial for customer workloads with high data throughput requirements — workloads such as in-cloud video rendering, data crunching for medical research, and digital video recording (DVR) in the cloud. For these and the myriad of other applications where speed and latency of access to data matter, a very special type of caching architecture is required to support enduser requirements.