What do we want? Swift storage policies! OpenStack: Yeah, fine

Thanks to new storage policy support, OpenStack's Swift v2.0 can now create storage containers with specific policies controlling their operation.

OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing system: it includes compute, storage, and networking layers. Swift is the object storage component, with Cinder being the block storage software.

Swift stores data as objects in volumes held in clusters. Its storage policies cover:

• Replication and the number of replicas. Containers have have different replica settings.
• Data location and sharing rules, so a central site has copy of all data with outer sites having their own data and making it sharable.
• Data tiering with information assigned to particular types of storage, such as flash, disk and tape, based on their access rates.

With storage policies in place, the stage is set for erasure coding to be added to Swift, which should improve its data protection. That might spark production deployments of Swift.

Storage Policies discussed in this Swift video ... click the image to play the vid

Above is a YouTube video of a Swift storage policy presentation at the May OpenStack Juno summit in Atlanta. Read the Swift v2.0 blog news here and download v2.0 Swift from here, for more information. ®