Object storage has established itself as a “standard storage” in the enterprise and cloud. As it brings many of the storage best practice to provide durability, scalability, availability and low cost to its users, it could draw further inspiration and become more differentiated in its usages.  The move towards storage classes in the public cloud that differentiate frequent and infrequent access of data is a step in this direction. When data backups are merely for digital preservation, their costs can be further reduced by drawing inspiration from cold storage systems such as Pelican. 

While public cloud object storage solutions are making progress, on-premise solutions have yet to catch up on these trends. Also, the use cases of on-premise storage are different from cloud storage. However, there is no denying that object storage- both on-premise and cloud are often used for frequent access by workloads as well as infrequent access that are backup oriented. As data ages and it is less frequently used, there are many gains to be made in terms of cost and efficiency such as with de-duplication and lowering power consumption.  

Pelican aims to be better than its overprovisioned counterpart racks using computations in software stacks. Pelican is not merely a power consumption optimization system. Pelican provides both a lower capital cost per disk as well as a lower running cost while previous work improved the latter only. Similarly, deduplication appliances can reduce the archival cost because it is performed only once with massive gains in disk usage. Together these kinds of savings further improve the appeal for object storage as it aims to differentiate usages to serve them best. 

Pelican is an extreme example for a storage class. It differentiates from the standard storage class very well in that the writes are scheduled and the power consumption is reduced. Workloads that use this tier are well known.  

However most of the workloads fall somewhere between these extremes. It is difficult for users to decide which storage class their workload should be assigned. In such cases, it may be better to assign the workload to an intermediate, which we can call the “intelligent storage class” and use it for determining whether a workload should be assigned to a different class.