Digital Integration: Overcoming Enterprise Data Challenges With many organizations struggling to incorporate various forms of media into their storage environments, it’s sometimes instructive to see how Web-scale companies went about solving the problem. Starting today, LinkedIn not only will to share how it built a distributed object storage optimized to handle media; it is now […]
Digital Integration: Overcoming Enterprise Data Challenges
With many organizations struggling to incorporate various forms of media into their storage environments, it’s sometimes instructive to see how Web-scale companies went about solving the problem. Starting today, LinkedIn not only will to share how it built a distributed object storage optimized to handle media; it is now willing to share the actual code.
LinkedIn today announced that the Ambry distributed object storage software it built is now available under an open source Apache license. Sriram Subramanian, manager for media infrastructure at LinkedIn, says Ambry was created to specifically address performance issue associated with having to support both small and large objects. In fact, LinkedIn says it relies on Ambry to serve up to 10,000 requests per second across more than 400 million users. More specifically, LinkedIn says Ambry latency is less than 50ms for a 1 MB object and reduces request rate imbalance among disks by a factor of eight, and consumes 88 percent of the network bandwidth allocated.
Ambry consists of a set of data nodes for storing and retrieving data, front-end machines that route requests after some preprocessing to the data nodes, and a cluster manager that coordinates and maintains the cluster. The frontend interacts with the data nodes in the remote data center when read-after-write consistency is required. The frontend provides an HTTP API to POST, GET and DELETE objects.
Subramanian says LinkedIn developed Ambry because it could not find a storage solution that addressed horizontal scalability, availability and active-active data center configurations. As LinkedIn continues to scale out a data center environment, the need to move beyond a traditional file system in order to distribute objects became a critical IT requirement, says Subramanian.
Naturally, as many IT organizations think through the impact that video, for example, is having on their Web sites, a lot of research work is being done on various approaches to modernizing storage environments. The upside of Ambry is that not only does it have a price point that can’t be beat, it has just as importantly already been battle tested by an IT organization well used to managing IT at a level of scale most other organizations will never see.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
The go-to resource for IT professionals from all corners of the tech world looking for cutting edge technology solutions that solve their unique business challenges. We aim to help these professionals grow their knowledge base and authority in their field with the top news and trends in the technology space.
Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.
