Storage technology has advanced considerably since the first disk drive was introduced about 50 years ago. However, the majority of technical advances have been inside the storage devices themselves, and not in the interfaces and protocols that access the devices. The block-based interface used to access storage has remained largely unchanged, yet it is the interface that ultimately determines the performance of storage devices and their applications.

Object-Based Storage (ObS) is a new technology being developed to address this problem. ObS is a better-balanced architecture that will enable efficient utilization of computing devices and input/output resources.

This class introduces Object-Based Storage, stressing the benefits of data sharing, security, and device intelligence. Emerging industry applications are introduced, as well as academic research being done that use objects as the platform for highly-intelligent storage devices.