Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Protocols > Dell EMC PowerScale OneFS S3 Overview > Introduction
Data is now a new form of capital. It provides the insights that facilitate your organization’s digital transformation, and 80% of the information is represented as unstructured data. Organizations in every industry generate an exponentially larger number of unstructured data volumes than ever before, from edge to core to cloud. The way of storing and managing unstructured data is evolving. Its goal is to unlock the value of your data by using both the traditional network attached storage (NAS) system and emerging object storage.
Many organizations run their critical applications on traditional NAS storage, and develop new modern applications using object storage. There are some challenges under the heterogeneous storage platforms for unstructured data:
Designed to address these challenges, Dell EMC PowerScale is ideal for demanding enterprise file workloads and can store, manage, and protect unstructured data with efficiency and massive scalability. It supports multiple NAS protocols natively for applications.
Starting with OneFS version 9.0, PowerScale enables accessing data through the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) application programing interface (API) natively. PowerScale implements the S3 API as a first-class protocol along with other NAS protocols on top of its distributed OneFS file system. Whether your application is based on traditional NAS storage or on the emerging object storage, the application can access data in a single scale-out storage platform through NAS protocols or the S3 API as needed. This document introduces how S3 API is implemented in OneFS and how it can provide high-performance data access.