Timeline for CAS and (distributed) Object Storage​

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The idea of this timeline came from the bazar I found in many different places with several inaccuracies that invited me to start to think about that historical model. I developed several versions of it and shared the 1st edition in the article "The History Boys: Object storage ... from the beginning" published in The Register in July 2016.

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5 years later, I published this updated timeline in StorageNewsletter in April 2021 to reflect market changes and evolutions and it would be a good idea probably to deliver a new version.

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It groups CAS, Content Addressable sometimes Aware Storage, officially started by FilePool more than 20 years ago with several technology and product iterations since that moment. The important aspect of this resides in the object storage philosophy, everything around block and file storage is out of this picture.

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I let the reader think about some market dynamics and trends but clearly some elements appear clearly with this image with open source and acquisition trends confirming that object storage is strategic for vendors and a must for users. A few remarks that help our audience to jump into the image faster:

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• We see lots of red bubbles meaning that the number of M&As is significant,

• We also find several open source projects,

• A few cease of operations,

• Not a lot of OEMs and very few reseller agreement probably due to the first remark above,

• A first period around 1998 to 2005 with CAS players and even before as we need to include FilePool,

• A second one from 2004-2005 to 2009 with object storage pioneers and the appearance of 2 famous open source projects, Amazon S3 appeared in March 2006,

• A third period from 2008-2009 to 2016 with a maturity period, and

• since 2015-2016 seeing an active M&As, cease of operations and confirmation of strong players plus the new infrastructure requirement around container and Kubernetes-based environment being a new axis of development for object storage.

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