Object storage works very well for unstructured data sets where data is generally read but not written to. Static Web content, data backups and archival images, and multimedia (videos, pictures, or music) files are best stored as objects. Databases in an object storage environment ideally have data sets that are unstructured, where the use cases suggest the data will not require a large number of writes or incremental updates.

Geographically distributed back-end storage is another great use case for object storage. The object storages applications present as network storage and support extendable metadata for efficient distribution and parallel access to objects. That makes it ideal for moving your back-end storage clusters across multiple data centers.

It is not recommended to use object storage for transactional data, especially because of the eventual consistency model outlined previously. In addition, it’s very important to recognize that object storage was not created as a replacement for NAS file access and sharing; it does not support the locking and sharing mechanisms needed to maintain a single accurately updated version of a file.

Because block-level storage devices are accessible as volumes and accessed directly by the operating system, they can perform well for a variety of use cases. Good examples for block storage use cases are structured database storage, random read/write loads, and virtual machine file system (VMFS) volumes. However, since block storage has essentially no additional storage-side metadata that can be associated with a given block other than the address of that block, performance degrades in geographically distributed systems. The further the block storage gets from the application, the more the performance suffers due to latency issues.