The tree-like file system hierarchy can handle millions of files quite easily, but once you scale to billions, it can start to slow up. Massive scalability Object storage brings massive scalability.

We look at unified file and object storage products from NetApp, Pure Storage and Scality, the differences, the workloads aimed at, and how unified they actually are.

Customers currently are ramping up their investments in distributed file systems and object storage as they chase the growth of unstructured data, which is increasingly 30% annually, Gartner says.

The addition of both file and object replication via the latest release of Pure Storage's Purity FB operating system is aimed at making the array more suitable for analytics and other workloads ...