  High-performance object stores are an emerging technology which offers an
alternative solution in the field of HPC storage, with potential to address
long-standing scalability issues in traditional distributed POSIX file systems
due to excessive consistency assurance and metadata prescriptiveness.
  In this paper we assess the performance of storing object-like data within a
standard file system, where the configuration and access mechanisms have not
been optimised for object access behaviour, and compare with and investigate
the benefits of using an object storage system.
  Whilst this approach is not exploiting the file system in a standard way,
this work allows us to investigate whether the underlying storage technology
performance is more or less important than the software interface and
infrastructure a file system or object store provides.
