A COS object storage system is a set of specialized appliances that include management appliances, access management appliances, and storage appliances. Assembled into a single system, these appliances enable the creation of object systems on a very large scale (IBM has several customers that have operational systems of over 100 Po capacity).
The CleverSafe access nodes receive the data and cut it into "slices" to disperse it between the storage nodes (via a Cauchy-Reed-Solomon information dispersion algorithm). An IBM COS object system is accessible via the S3 API or via the Swift API. External gateways may allow access in NAS or SAN mode.
The manufacturer's architecture is generally considered very good for long-term archiving of large files, but less suitable for processing more transactional applications and requiring the storage of smaller files, even if Cleversafe and IBM have made optimizations for this last use.
COS technology is also lagging behind its competitors in opening NAS and SAN protocols , although it is possible to use third-party gateways such as Avere, Ctera, Nasuni or Panzura to access a COS platform.
Notably, IBM COS can be transparently used by a Hadoop cluster to store its data.
It should be noted that IBM COS is today the basis of IBM's cloud object storage offer (public and dedicated).